


for whatever shifting definition of legality

by Casylum



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-24
Updated: 2016-02-06
Packaged: 2018-04-27 20:57:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5063845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Casylum/pseuds/Casylum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Isaac Lahey is an international art thief, forger, and con man extraordinaire. Scott McCall is an FBI agent. Allison Argent is a security consultant. Together they...fight crime?</p><p>[White Collar AU]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_Paris, France_  
_March, 2009_

 

The Louvre is the last straw.

 

Scott’s over in the Musée d’Orsay, surveying the spot where a Van Gogh had hung until about six hours ago, give or take, the very finest of Parisian police and the occasional Interpol agent milling through the gallery behind him when his phone rings. It’s Danny Mahealani, calling on his personal line, the one only for emergencies and Allison.

 

“McCall,” he says absently after picking up, attention still focused on the origami wolf’s head tacked to the slightly lighter square of wall in front of him.

 

“He’s done it again,” Danny says, and there’s that hint of begrudging admiration that they’re all starting to sport.

 

“Who?” Scott asks, turning away and starting to weave his way through the crowd, heading towards the street outside. He already knows who, because there’s only one person that’d get Danny—or any of his team, really—to call on his emergency line, but he wants him to say it.

 

“Kuryakin,” Danny says after a second, and Scott takes that as his cue to curse for as long as it takes him to finish exiting the Musée, the sounds of rapid and annoyed gutter Spanish echoing off the vaulted ceilings.

 

“Right,” he says, switching back to English as he hits the doors, “Where’d he hit this time?”

 

Danny pauses for a second and Scott can feel the headache coming on, no words necessary.

 

“The Louvre,” he finally says, and Scott drops right back into Spanish.

 

~~~

 

He’d first hit about three—maybe four, they’re not sure, which is _infuriating_ —years ago, the man they’re now calling Kuryakin. A vault in Lisbon had turned up empty when it was supposed to be full of gold bullion, with nothing but a small origami crown left behind.

 

Scott knew there had been others before the Lisbon heist, including an impressive long con involving land deals in mainland China, Japanese bearer bonds, and a Romanian real estate investor, but the Lisbon job was the one that put him officially on the FBI’s—and therefore Scott’s—radar.

 

Kuryakin had been Midas at first—for the gold, let no one ever say that the FBI are particularly inventive—but then he lifted a set of Matroyshka dolls from the Hermitage, a section of the Parthenon frieze from the British Museum, a shipment of security filaments from the U.S. Mint in California, anything and everything, for no other reason, seemingly, than because he _could_.

 

They didn’t even have a real name for him, which was doubly frustrating, just an out-of-focus black and white photo of him with another man, both of them in profile and shadowed heavily enough that Scott wasn’t even sure it was people he was looking at when he first saw it.

 

It was Vernon Boyd who’d named him, after he’d accidentally left the photos lying out where his wife could see them, and Erica had commented on how much the two of them—one light, one dark, both mysterious—resembled the basic outlines of _The Man From U.N.C.L.E._ ’s Ilya Kuryakin and Napoleon Solo. Aside from a moniker borrowed from a sixties television show and a growing list of thefts, forgeries, and general confidence schemes attributed to him, Scott and the rest of his team knew nothing about Kuryakin except that he liked origami.

 

A year or so after they started chasing Kuryakin, with two of them on permanent rotating standby to go to the location of his last job and scrub the scene for even a hint of a suggestion of a clue, Scott had been home in New York, standing in line at the Portuguese bakery on sixteenth street, one eye on the crowd as he talked to Allison about dinner and her parents’ upcoming visit when someone bumped into him from behind.

 

He’d turned slightly, looked the guy in the eye and gave the sheepish half-smile that meant ‘no big deal’, then turned back to the front of the line. It wasn’t until Allison hung up and he’d collected the box full of malasadas and cavacas that it had hit him, and he’d nearly dropped the box and run a man over sprinting to the door, firm in the belief that he’d just seen Kuryakin, and, more importantly, Kuryakin knew enough about the FBI investigation into him to know who Scott was.

 

He hadn’t seen him on the street that day, but surveillance footage from the pastry shop gave them their first clear image of Kuryakin, smiling shyly at Scott, whose face was turned towards him. It wasn’t a lot—hell, it wasn’t anything where the courts were concerned—but it was enough to run facial recognition and get a name: Isaac Lahey, formerly of the California foster care system, now off the—official—grid for more than ten years.

 

He still had that picture; Allison had magneted it to the front of the fridge the night he’d brought it home.

 

“He’s important,” she’d explained, when he’d asked why, “And important stuff goes on the fridge, whether we like it or not.”

 

It’s the reason, he knew, why her grandfather’s death certificate—signed and witnessed by three separate doctors and the former Commissioner of the Yankees—hangs on the fridge in her father’s house, so he didn’t—and doesn’t—question it.

 

They still have no idea who Solo is.

 

~~~

 

Scott gets to the Louvre as fast as he possibly can in a city that doesn’t care one whit that two—at least—pieces of priceless art have been stolen in the last twelve hours, so long as it doesn’t bother them. The language is a bit of a hindrance as well, but Allison’s been teaching him—“All the better to talk to my mother, honey, she’s much less scary in French”—add his Spanish, and it’s enough to hail him a cab and get the driver to drop him off in front of the museum at at least European rates, instead of the usual Parisian drag that seems to be reserved especially for Americans.

 

He pulls his cell phone—the work one; the emergency line stays in his pocket—out after he pays the cab driver, dialing Danny as he takes the steps two at a time.

 

Danny picks up on the second ring. “Hey, boss, where’re you at?”

 

“Front entrance,” Scott says, dodging a group of German schoolchildren. “Doing my best to thread the needle. You?”

 

“In front of that headless lady, you know the one,” Danny says, effortlessly disregarding the Winged Victory in the way only he can.

 

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Scott says, then hangs up.

 

Getting to Danny is the work of a few minutes, getting to the scene of the crime is a whole different matter.

 

“Near as I can tell,” Danny says, taking them both up the stairs, “It’s like he went on a shopping spree. We’ve got two Raphael’s tagged, a Vermeer, possibly a Da Vinci, a Manet—which he’s welcome to, by the way, it’s ugly—and a Gauguin. All stolen, all replaced with forgeries, all have origami figures hidden in the frames.”

 

“Do we know when?” Scott is…well. Scott is impressed despite of himself. That’s a pretty long list of art, art that’s watched day and night by some of the tightest security museums have to offer. For all of it to both go missing _and_ be replaced, Kuryakin had to have planned for _months_ , if not years.

 

It’s incredible, it’s amazing, it’s a beautiful crime, and Scott is more than aware that he’ll probably never see its like again.

 

Danny shakes his head as they reach the top of the stairs and turn left, walking briskly down the corridors of the old palace. “No idea on the timetable. One of them—the Manet, I think—was taken down for cleaning this morning, and the art restorer found an origami frog on the back of the canvas. She called security, they emptied out the museum, did a full sweep, came up with the list I just gave you.”

 

“She sure it’s a fake, not just him messing with us, pulling us away from the Musée d’Orsay, or somewhere else?” Scott’s damn sure Kuryakin had actually done it, but he’s got to ask all the questions, make sure that everyone else is on the same page as him. Going straight on assumptions is a good way to get obsessed, not to mention the fact that even though he’s the Senior Special Agent, he’s still human, and he’s still _wrong_.

 

Not often, but often enough.

 

“Yep,” Danny says. “She’s sure, her friend’s sure, her friend’s old professor at the University—who, she assures me, helped re-authenticate half of these after World War II—is sure, everyone.”

 

“Motherfucker,” Scott says, and that’s when they reach the first huddle of crime scene techs.

 

There’s a table set up in this room, a plastic and metal affair that looks out of place amongst all the art and gilt. Bags and bright orange containers are strewn across the top, but there’s a section towards the end that’s cleared off, with nothing but a few pieces of brightly coloured paper scattered across it.

 

Scott walks up to it, still half listening to Danny give him the rundown of events. There are six origami shapes there: the frog Danny had already mentioned, a unicorn, a sword, a star, a rose, and another wolf’s head.

 

The star is folded a little sloppier that the others, so maybe that’s why he sees it, but when he bends down, there’s just the faintest line of pencil grey peeking through the bright yellow of the paper.

 

“Hey, Mahealani,” he says, interrupting Danny, and points down at the star. “You see that?”

 

Danny bends down, does his own inspection. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. What do you think it is?”

 

“No fucking clue,” Scott says, waving an evidence tech over. “He’s never left, uh, notes before.”

 

When the tech arrives, he asks her—in his best French; this is still, technically, the Parisian Metropolitan Police’s crime scene—if she has anyone who could unfold the star for them. There’s a question as to why; he points out the pencil marks, and she goes in search of someone with more authority and job security.

 

Twenty minutes later, after all the shapes have been photographed, swabbed, scanned, and finally unfolded, Scott and Danny just rock back on their heels and stare.

 

“Hiya, Special Agent McCall,” reads the one from the rose, “what’s doing?”

 

The sword had revealed “Gotta catch ‘em all”, which Scott is sure is just Kuryakin fucking with them, even if it’s on a higher level than usual.

 

The ones from the star, unicorn, frog, and wolf had flowed into a short letter, the longest communication anyone’s ever had with Kuryakin since Scott had absently smiled at him in a bakery two years ago.

 

“Hallo,” the note said. “It’s me, clearly. Don’t bother with the handwriting, it’s not mine. I just wanted to say: the d’Orsay wasn’t me. I’ve nothing against it, no one should, but I haven’t robbed it. Impersonated a docent, maybe—calm down, McCall—but never stolen. I got what I wanted from Paris a while back, I’ve no need to repeat myself. Look for the Dutchman instead (there’s a name for you), follow the Van Goghs. Say hi to Melly for me. Kuryakin.”

 

There’s an overly cheerful looking smiley face drawn after the name, which is written on the paper that had previously been the star. Danny and Scott are silent, still absorbing what’s in front of them.

 

“Who’s Melly?” Danny asks after a minute, turning to look questioningly at Scott.

 

“Black lab puppy,” Scott says, reading over the note for what seems like the thousandth time, but is really more like the fourth. “Allison just picked her up yesterday, we’ve been thinking about it for a while, just decided on the name this morning.”

 

“No fucking way did he do this this morning,” Danny says, sweeping an arm out to indicate the rest of the Louvre.

 

Scott hums, eyebrows furrowing a bit. “The theft, no, I don’t think so, but….the notes? Yeah, I think he did these this morning.”

 

“So,” Danny says, and now his eyebrows are crinkling up as well, “He steals all this stuff who knows when, _gets away scot-free_ —pun unintentional, I assure you—then comes back however much time later to, what? Leave you notes so you won’t blame him for something he didn’t do?”

 

Scott rubs the back of his neck, almost embarrassed for reasons he can’t explain. “Yes? I’m not sure why he’s telling us like _this_ —because he definitely knows who we are and how to get in touch with us, there’s no need to blow a job for a warning—but he must think it’s important.”

 

Danny sighs, and scrubs his face with his hands. “This is the last thing we need,” he says, voice still a bit muffled. “A thief with honor who wants proper credit and will give up _other thieves_ if they try to frame him because _he cares what you think about him_.”

 

“Not me,” Scott says, protesting, “The FBI. We’re all—all of us in white collar crime—after him. I’m not Batman.”

 

Danny grins. “Sure about that, McCall? You did, after all, marry Catwoman.”

 

Scott rolls his eyes. “Allison know you call her that?”

 

“Yep,” Danny says, grin widening. “She said she was more of a Huntress than Catwoman, but she’d take what she could get.”

 

“Unbelievable,” Scott mutters, thinking that if he’s Batman, then Kuryakin is the Joker minus—so far—the homicidal mania.

 

~~~

 

 _New York City, New York, USA_  
_September, 2009_  
_Six months later_

 

Six months later, Scott and his team are no closer to finding out when Kuryakin pulled the Louvre job, or who did the d’Orsay heist.

 

All they’ve got—thanks to Kuryakin, which rankles—is the name Dutchman and the Van Gogh connection, a lead which is frustratingly hard to follow up on, seeing as no judge in the world will give them any sort of warrant based on the supposed word of a known criminal.

 

At least—and Scott gives thanks every day for this—he, along with the rest of his team, are back stateside, and will be staying there for the foreseeable future. Melly’s grown bigger than he thinks any dog has a right to in the city, a dervish of dark fur and excitement that bounces around the house like a mad hatter.

 

Allison’s business—a security firm she co-owns with Lydia Martin, a friend from college—is starting to pick up, her client list starting to expand beyond those who talk about Chris Argent in nothing but the most reverent of whispers.

 

Work—aside from the ongoing Kuryakin situation, which Scott honestly thinks will last for the rest of his life—even slows down enough for him to remember that he’s got friends, people who like talking to him for reasons other than he’s their boss.

 

Admittedly, he reconnects by way of a petty smash-and-grab that just so happens to involve a federal fugitive, and spends the first couple minutes of their renewed interaction by stomping all over any and all jurisdictional boundaries he and the brightest minds at the New York field office can think of, but whatever. Stiles will get over it.

 

Later that night, after four rounds of beer at O’Hallighan’s—paid for by Scott; he’s a fed, not a complete asshole—Stiles does get over it. It’s an improvement on the last time Scott and his team rolled up on something local that turned out to be a bit more, during which Stiles had taken full advantage of the fact that it had been nickel shot night—which, lamentably, is tonight as well—and nearly drunk himself and half the NYPD into cheap booze induced oblivion.

 

“Dude,” Stiles says, indicating with his half full glass, “I’m not even sure _how_ this keeps happening.”

 

“You have no self-control?” Danny suggests from where he’s sitting on Scott’s other side, Boyd and Erica’s drinks left under his watchful gaze as they do their best to turn the corner by the jukebox—free plays on nickel shot night, _thanks so much, Ethan_ —into a functioning dancefloor.

 

Stiles points an accusing finger at Danny. “You, shut up. I have _amazing_ self-control. Legendary self-control. Ask anyone.”

 

Scott sees Danny’s eyes sliding to him and puts his hands up as fast as he can. “Don’t ask me, I am not part of this particular conversation, and I never want to be. Ever.”

 

Stiles laughs, then leans in, beer still in hand. “No, but really,” he says, suddenly serious. “Why the hell do you keep showing up at crime scenes? I’m homicide, I’m not even supposed to be _near_ smash-and-grabs or any other kind of robbery unless Castiglioni’s off on leave, and you’re white collar, big money crime.”

 

He takes a drink, continues. “Neither of us should have been at that bodega, even if there was a fugitive involved—he was narcotics’ problem on both fronts, and you and I both know it—so why the fuck do I keep getting pulled in as FBI liaison on cases I sure as hell shouldn’t be liaising on, at least not with _you_?”

 

Scott has no answer.

 

No, scratch that, he’s got an answer, he’s got over three years’ worth of an answer, a filing cabinet in his office devoted to Kuryakin, a shelf in his home office, an unofficial rule at the house that he’s not allowed to speak of the man or the case on weekends, and a growing sense that Kuryakin is somehow…watching him.

 

Waiting for something, maybe.

 

Definitely driving him and, by extension, his team insane.

 

Stiles doesn’t know, because Scott and him haven’t talked about work related stuff outside of work in months, about Kuryakin at _all_ , ever, and none of the cases Scott keeps involving himself in have had anything to do with Kuryakin, no matter how much he thinks that this time, this time he’ll get _something_.

 

Which, damn it, that’s unhealthy, and unfair, and maybe a little rude. If he’d done it to Allison—and he’d tried, the first few months they’d known each other, before she’d shown him she could just as easily dropkick him into next week as hire somebody else to do it—she’d have his head for it, right now, and maybe a bit more if he kept fucking with her when she _knew_ something was up.

 

So Scott looks at Danny, Danny gets the hint and gets up, going over to where Erica and Boyd are doing the smoothest version of the electric slide he’s ever seen, and Scott turns to his best friend in the whole wide world, excluding the woman he married.

 

“So, there’s a guy,” he starts, and he can almost see the echo of ‘there’s always a guy’ flit across Stiles’ face. He ignores it, and plows on.

 

~~~

 

 _Grant County, Nebraska, USA_  
_May, 2010_  
_Eight months later_

 

So far as Scott can tell, there’s nothing in Grant County.

 

Nothing in Nebraska, truth be told—or, at least, nothing that would interest an international art thief, forger, and con man extraordinaire—but here he is, staring at security footage from a small local airport and watching Kuryakin stroll from the single entrance gate to the exit doors off-screen.

 

No sign of Solo, but, then again, aside from that one picture they’d gotten lucky with, there never was.

 

The airport car rental agency had him taking a black mid-model Volkswagen sedan—one that had actually left the lot, not been switched around for another—and various traffic cameras had him driving to a motel off the highway.

 

After that…nothing. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t sneaked away, hadn’t made any sort of effort to hide himself from anyone who was looking for him. It was worse than strange, it was _worrying_ , and Scott was halfway on his way to being mad that a criminal he’d never spoken to—and had only once, unknowingly, seen face to face—had managed to get him concerned for his wellbeing.

 

“What do we do?” he finally asks, once he’s read over all their information one last time, looking up to survey the tiny conference-slash-breakroom they’d been given for the duration of whatever the hell this turned out to be. Danny’s there, and Boyd, the both of them with similar folders in front of them. The police chief for Grant County, Maran Shelk, is there as well, leaning against the wall behind Danny.

 

“It’s almost too neat,” Boyd says.

 

“Like he wants us to find him,” Maran adds.

 

“Like the Louvre,” Danny says, and Scott nods. Over a year later, and they still haven’t figured out when Kuryakin had done that particular job, and the staff of the preservation office keeps sending him newly discovered bits of origami by express mail.

 

“There’s no way this is on accident,” he concludes, “And yet we’re going to go after him anyway. Hopefully, maybe, if we’re lucky, he’ll tell us why he suddenly decided to just roll over.”

 

Scott’s not looking forward to that last part, none of them are. They’ve been chasing Kuryakin on-and-off for over four years, always a step behind, yet always _there_. They didn’t have to get calls about another one of his jobs—be it theft, forgery, or graft—because they were already there because they _knew_ him, and were the only team that did.

 

Most of that was Scott, banging his head against the wall that was their general lack of information on him—the name Isaac Lahey is there, but there’s only so much a name can give when the man who owns it doesn’t use it.

 

Even Stiles—and, more begrudgingly, Allison—had gotten caught up in the mix, their weekly meet-ups for dinner at Scott and Allison’s somehow, after he’d told Stiles everything that night at O’Hallighan’s, turning into long discussions of just what the fuck was going on. Scott’s good at his job, damn good, but Stiles and Allison are a tad trickier in their thinking than he’s ever been, their wild leaps of logic fitting in with the more sensible progression that Scott had already mapped out. He had known the how, the when, and maybe the where next, but they’d given him the why, which was just as important as the other three combined.

 

Now, though, there wasn’t any strategizing, any planning. There wasn’t a long night spent at the Federal Building with Boyd, Danny, and whatever other poor schlub he managed to pull in to bounce things off of, or an equally long session with Stiles, Allison, and Melly on the balcony at his place.

 

There was just Grant County, Nebraska, and a clear as hell trail pointing to a rundown no-tell motel.

 

“Alright,” he says, quietly. “Let’s go get the bastard.”

 

_~~~_

 

 _United States Penitentiary, Florence ADX_  
_Florence, Colorado_  
_June, 2010_  
_Sixteen days later_

 

Isaac Lahey is nothing like Kuryakin.

 

Scott’s in a viewing room, on the other side of a two-way mirror, staring at the man he intends to give a permanent bunk in this concrete hellhole.

 

He’s tall, lanky, with a crop of brown hair that’s more than a little too long. His eyes are nervous, his hands twist when he thinks no one’s looking, and his shoulders hunch visibly in the bright prison orange of his jumpsuit. His voice even shakes when he’s talking to Deaton, who’d flown in special from the New York City field office to have a chat with him. There’s no sign of suave smoothness, of a master thief who’d robbed the Louvre blind and then come back and put a neon sign on the bits he’d touched just to send a message.

 

Scott’s not sure if this is who Lahey is, when he’s not playing the role of Kuryakin from a distance, or if he’s trying to pull one over on the whole of the FBI and the FBP.

 

It’s not going to work, mainly because Scott’s told the warden, the warden’s boss, Deaton, and anyone else who’ll listen that Lahey’s the worst kind of flight risk, because he spent most of his criminal career breaking into shit that was supposed to be unbreakable. Doing it in reverse and in handcuffs isn’t going to be that much of a challenge, even in the Alcatraz of the Rockies, and _especially_ not if Lahey manages to swing a transfer to a min-sec white collar crime facility.

 

He’s broken out of his reverie—one he’s been falling into more and more these past couple days, trying to figure out the _why_ of everything—when Deaton stands up. He looks through the two-way mirror—straight at Scott, it feels like—and gives the slightest of nods.

 

Scott sighs, shoves a hand through his hair—it’s getting ridiculous, almost as long as Lahey’s—and pushes himself off the wall from where he’s been standing before going to meet Deaton in the hall.

 

“Well?” He asks, as soon as he’s in earshot and certain that the door to the interrogation room is closed.

 

Deaton looks faintly amused. “He’s definitely playing us. Not to his advantage, though, which is interesting.”

 

“He could be in there saying he’s no idea what we’re talking about, we’ve got the wrong guy,” Scott says, agreeing. “Instead he’s, he’s… _twitching_.”

 

“Which means one of very many possibilities,” Deaton says. “He’s either protecting someone, hiding from someone, or this is exactly where he wants to be for some other, unfathomable reason.”

 

“A mix of the first two, I’m betting,” Scott replies, a bit distantly, the scene of the arrest going back through his head. It had been stupidly easy, just assemble strike team, knock on door, and hey, presto! International fugitive, all tied up.

 

“We haven’t heard hide nor hair of Solo,” he continues, “Which means that either he’s fickler than we thought, or he’s hiding as well, somewhere other than the intimate clutches of Uncle Sam. They’re both—at least to the criminal element, since no one knows Lahey’s here but the feds, and no one knows Lahey’s Kuryakin but us—in the wind, and neither are making any sort of effort to get him back to freedom. So…”

 

“They’re in hiding,” Deaton finishes thoughtfully. “Lord knows why Lahey chose the FBI to be his bushel, but he must trust us more than whatever the hell is gunning for him out there.”

 

Scott grimaces. “Either they’re not as good as Lahey—because, like I’ve said again and again, he could twist his way out of here if he wants—or they don’t want the attention that would come from getting into a place like this, even by proxy.”

 

Deaton nods. “No matter what the case is, they’re certainly persistent—and dangerous—enough that both Lahey and Solo chose this as their best bet.

“Which means,” and here he smiles, and Scott gets a hell of a lot more nervous than he was before. Heads of state have gone an unhealthy sort of pale when Alan Deaton smiles, and Scott’s no different. “You’re going to have to go in there, and talk to him.”

 

Scott tries very, very hard not to flinch.

 

He’d been avoiding being alone with Lahey—and it was Lahey, now, Kuryakin put away now that the FBI had him in custody—ever since the arrest.

 

Scott wanted to say that it was because of professionalism, that no one was ever supposed to be alone with prisoners, or that he was doing it so Allison wouldn’t worry, which was complete and utter bullshit. Allison could take care of herself, and had made sure that Scott was at least to the Chris Argent standard of resting badassery within the first year of their relationship, and people—FBI agents, prison guards, lawyers—were alone with prisoners all the time, the watchful single eye of the surveillance camera in the corner keeping the civil niceties at least mostly in play.

 

Instead, Scott kept remembering the day at the bakery, the quick and breezy look he’d gotten at Lahey—back when he was still only Kuryakin—and the easy smile that had come natural as breathing. From both of them. Lahey hadn’t done anything then, just showed up, made sure Scott saw him, and left, like all he’d wanted was to see him.

 

The damn picture’s still on his fridge; he and Allison see it every day.

 

It’s a level of focus—of obsession, if he’s being honest with himself—that worries him with its intensity. Deaton’s looking at him expectantly, though, and he’s not about to tell the Assistant Special Agent In Charge of the New York City FBI Field Office’s white collar crime division that he doesn’t want to talk to the suspect that he’s been chasing for over four years because he’s got…Scott doesn’t even know what the hell he’s got, but he doesn’t want to tell Deaton a damn thing about it.

 

“Yeah, okay,” he finally says, which, while not stellar, allows him to slide by his boss’ boss and open the interrogation room door.

 

~~~

 

The first time Isaac Lahey saw Special Agent Scott McCall was in London.

 

He’d just lifted a bit of the Parthenon—heavy bugger, all jagged edges and marble slipperiness—and sent it on a winding journey back to where it’d come from. He’d been resting from all the heavy lifting in a café across from the British Museum, hot coffee in hand and scarf secure around his neck, the image of a university student complete and unassuming.

 

It was raining out, one of the deluges the Isles were so famous for, and he’d taken another bracing sip, glad that his hair had dried fast enough so that he—and his timestamped receipt—could easily say that he’d been here since before it began, right in the middle of the time he was supposed to have been nicking antiquities. Not that he thought they’d pull him in for this one, but it never hurt to be prepared.

 

A taxi had pulled up then, disgorging two men dressed to federal nines, complete with wrinkled trenchcoats and umbrellas that looked a tad too new to belong to anyone who lived in London full time.

 

He smiled, took a sip of his coffee. Americans, then, it had to be, or Interpol.

 

They went into the Museum, and Isaac stayed where he was, waiting for the rain to stop.

 

Twenty minutes later, the rain was still going full force, but the Americans-maybe-Interpol were on their way out again. They stopped near the curb, the taller of the two under an umbrella and chatting on a mobile while the other one stood next to him, out of the umbrella’s reach, slowly getting drenched in the steady downpour, his face turned up to the grey sky.

 

And then he smiled, like he’d just figured something out, something important, and just kept on looking up.

He’d had Derek find out who he was as soon as he’d gotten back to where he was staying.

 

He left the first origami for him—for Special Agent Scott McCall—in California a few weeks later.

 

A year later, he’d been in New York City for one reason or another, and happened to chance upon McCall going into a padaria. Isaac hadn’t been able to help himself, found himself wending his way inside just to get a closer look at him, dry and in his element. He’d gotten a smile out of that, and a flutter in his chest that was almost worth the reaming Derek gave him once he found out that he’d not only _touched an FBI agent_ but had also had the bad graces to _get caught on camera doing it_.

 

Two years, and a whole hell of a lot of near misses later—McCall was almost getting eerie, with the way he was always _there_ , no matter how much Isaac tried to mix it up, throw him off—Isaac found himself wandering the halls of the Louvre in the early morning, tucking tiny bits of folded paper into various works of his—and others’, it didn’t hurt to keep them on their toes—art as he listened to the sirens head in the opposite direction, towards the Musée d’Orsay.

 

Now, four years out, with something a hell of a lot stronger than a flutter beating about just behind his breastbone, he’s facing McCall opposite the wrong side of an interrogation table.

 

He’s been doing his best with the others who’ve been in here, giving the right mix of fear (all too real), nervousness (only half faked), and mildly sycophantic pleading (reverse psychology at its finest). He doesn’t particularly want to be _here_ , he imagines no one pictures Florence ADX when they think of a place they’d like to spend any significant amount of time, but he also doesn’t want to be _out there_ , where nasty things like Peter are lurking in the dark, waiting for him to let his guard down.

 

(It has occurred to him that that’s exactly what McCall and the FBI have been doing as well, but somehow their attention feels…benevolent when compared to Peter’s. Familial, even.

 

Less psychotic, certainly.)

 

McCall, though…he doesn’t think he can do it. He’s trying right now, maybe a little too hard, but he doesn’t think he can make it stick. He _wants_ McCall to see him, to recognize the opponent he’s chased across continents, to know that, yeah, the guy who wrote him notes in the Louvre and sent him running across the globe only half-a-step behind him is sitting _right here_.

 

He, to quote Derek in one of his more vocal moods, is so fucked.

 

“The last job we have you on is Bogotá,” McCall says abruptly, pulling Isaac back to the present. “That was, what, three months ago? Where’ve you been, Lahey?”

 

 _Shit_.

 

It’s not the first time McCall’s said his name—that was when he’d been reading Isaac his Miranda Rights; “Isaac Lahey, you have the right to remain silent”—but it’s the first time he’s not in the middle of being arrested, and motherfucking shit.

 

It’s doing things to him.

 

(Mental Derek has escalated from vocal outbursts to loud, disgusted sighs.)

 

“Oh, you know,” and god fucking _damn_ it his voice is more Hackney than Anaheim, he might as well just roll over _right now_ and tell McCall and his scary-as-fuck boss everything—“Around.” He smiles, all the way to the eyes, happy even as his brain—assisted by Mental Derek—castigates him for being so stupid.

 

McCall’s eyes visibly sharpen at the accent, and when Isaac smiles, man.

 

He comes alive.

 

Whatever nerves or misgivings he might have had—and he had something, Isaac was sure of it—were gone, and he’s left facing the best the FBI—or any agency—has ever been able to throw at him. His smile widens.

 

“Around like Paris?” McCall asks. “Or have you been back in New York City, lurking around the paderias on the off chance you might run into an FBI agent?”

 

“Oh, no,” Isaac leans forward across the table, ignoring the drag of his chains against the metal surface, and drops his voice. “I only make time for one fed in particular. Maybe you’ve heard of him? Senior Special Agent Scott McCall, out of New York, a real firecracker, nearly caught some guy called Kuryakin dead to rights in Milan last year.”

 

“Did he now?” McCall’s leaning in, too, his face just the other side of _way too damn close_ for any sort of professionalism. “Because he was pretty certain they were already in Zaragoza by the time he even got to Italy.”

 

Isaac’s not really clear on how eyes are supposed to twinkle, but he’s pretty damn sure his are fit to rival the White House Christmas Tree. “Maybe, just maybe, Kuryakin was actually just across the street, grabbing coffee, and he got damn lucky that he’d know that jawline anywhere, even when he’s not expecting it.”

 

McCall huffs out a laugh, leans back— _finally_ , thank you Jesus for some modicum of…something—and just sits there for a minute, considering him.

 

Isaac settles back himself, arranging his chains in as comfortable a way as he possibly can. McCall is…not what he expected, not really. He’d been drawn to him sure, but there’s only so much that background checks and the occasional spying mission can do, especially when he’d been doing his damndest to run in the _opposite_ direction of McCall for the last four years or so.

 

It wasn’t like he could send Derek either—not that Derek got sent anywhere he hadn’t already decided he wanted to go. They may only have one photo of him, but that was one more photo than any other agency in the entire _world_ had managed in the decade or so Derek had been active, and he refused to get any closer than he absolutely had to.

 

So they’d had the barebones facts—FBI agent, white collar crime, married, lives in New York, raised by a single mother—and some pretty solid physical evidence that the man did not give up. Steadfast and determined did not a fun person usually make, even if Isaac was continuously tempted to add ‘cute’ to the list of descriptors.

 

Now he’s in jail, however, and McCall’s...McCall’s...McCall’s… _flirting with him_.

 

Or something.

 

 _So fucked_ , Mental Derek repeats, and Isaac groans internally.

 

“Here’s the thing,” McCall says, obviously oblivious to—or just politely ignoring—Isaac’s current personal crisis. “We’ve got almost nothing on you.”

 

At that, he looks up. Facts like ‘we have little to no hard evidence you’ve committed the crime you’re imprisoned for committing’ is not the kind of thing people just go around saying. Prosecuting lawyers are practically trained from day one to skirt around that fact as much as possible, and obfuscation is literally the name of the game in jury trials.

 

“There’s maybe twenty jobs you’ve pulled, in the last four years or so?” McCall continues, watching Isaac closely enough that he can feel the sweat start beading on the back of his neck.

 

“Closer to thirty,” he says, voice hoarse, the Hackney stronger than ever. “Allegedly.”

 

McCall hums in agreement. “Allegedly. We’ve got evidence you were there for maybe ten of them, circumstantial mostly, a whole evidence locker full of origami—thanks, by the way, you’ve gotten Boyd into it—and solid, hard proof that you were in Memphis last year, dishing out counterfeit Old Masters with the guy we’re calling the Dutchman, the guy you say pulled the Musée d’Orsay heist over a year ago.”

 

“You kept the name,” Isaac says, smiling.

 

“Couldn’t think of anything better,” McCall says, shrugging. “Anyway, that’s one hard example of fraud and bunch of other felonies, plus a strong hint that you’ve done a hell of a lot more. The most that’ll get you, with the way you look? Five years, maybe six, probably in minimum security, maybe medium if you show yourself to be a flight risk.”

 

“Nothing more?” Isaac asks, and damn it, he almost sounds disappointed.

 

“Juries love stories like yours,” McCall says with a lopsided grin, before his face settles into a more serious expression. “Five years, and you’re out, Lahey. Five years, and whoever you’re running from is gonna snatch you up as fast as they can.”

 

“I’m not running from anyone.” He’s proud of that one, his voice doesn’t wobble at all, the sincerity is hitting all the right marks.

 

McCall doesn’t buy it for a second. “You say that, but here you are. You saw us coming in Milan, in Tokyo, in half-a-dozen other places, and you rabbited so fast I’ve found coffee that’s still steaming, and no trace of you or any of the crimes we’ve been chasing you for.

 

“Grant County, though?” McCall leans forward again, eyes steady on Isaac’s. “Grant County’s got nothing. No art, no land developments, no out of the way buildings, nothing to rob, nowhere to headquarter a con, nowhere to _run_ a con. There’s no reason for you to be there, and yet there we found you anyway.

 

“It was too damn easy, Lahey.” McCall’s voice is shaking in something very much like anger, which is impossible. He’d caught him, Isaac was in handcuffs and facing several long years of dreadful food and abysmal company, and McCall was _angry_ about it. It made no sense.

 

“Too damn easy,” he repeats. “But if here’s where you want to be, here’s where I’ll keep you.”

 

And then he stands up, turns around, and walks away.

 

~~~

 

 _New York City, New York_  
_May, 2015_  
_Four years, ten months, and six days later_

 

The day, no the _moment_ Scott brought home the picture of Isaac Lahey, the con artist formerly known as Kuryakin, Allison had known they were in trouble.

 

It wasn’t the first time she’d heard of the man, or his exploits, but it was the first time she’d seen him. Young, thin, looking more like a street rat than someone who routinely treated the art houses of the world as personal shopping malls, and looking at her husband like he hung the moon.

 

Which, okay, so had Allison when they first started dating, but she’d gotten over that. Mostly. Didn’t make the fact that this man, this… _kid_ —because Scott had finally been able to get an ID a couple days later, Isaac Lahey, twenty-five-ish, from seemingly nowhere at all—was making the same face she had the first time she’d run into Scott on the UC Berkeley campus.

 

Scott didn’t see it, though, none of his team did. Where she saw a man in the full throes of a crush that was doomed to go absolutely _nowhere_ , her husband and the whole of the FBI saw a criminal who’d had the chance to taunt one of their own and taken it.

Lydia, when Allison first showed her the picture—now magneted to her and Scott’s fridge—and told her about it, laughed for a solid minute, almost knocking over her drink.

 

“Oh, honey,” she’d said, once she’d regained control of herself. “You look at him the same way, the both of you.”

 

~~~ 

 

Allison had drunk an entire bottle of Jameson that night, and refused to talk about it ever again. Not Lahey—she could never call him Kuryakin—because _that_ was both stupid and unavoidable. The fact that she and Scott might be just as inexplicably… _drawn_ to Lahey as he was to Scott, though, _that_ she could shove into the black box in her head marked _Gerard & Other Fucked Up Things_ and never think of it again.

 

Definitely never.

 

God damn it.

 

And then, two years or so after the worst hangover of Allison’s life, the asshole had to go and hit the Louvre.

 

Scott came home from Paris with a sparkle in his eyes, a grin for Melly, a full on smile and sweep-you-off-your-feet kiss for Allison, and a bag of origami notes from Lahey in his carry on.

 

(She read them while Scott was in the shower, washing off the dust of France and the chemicals of airplane travel, and came to the conclusion that Lahey, for all of his other crimes, has also got a mouth on him.

 

Allison most assuredly does not like that about him.

 

Not one whit.)

 

It had settled, a little, after that. Lydia still snickered every time she saw the picture on their fridge, and had even brought Erica, the wife of Scott’s Boyd into the mix, the both of them taking sips of various types of hard liquor and sighing disappointedly at her. (If Scott noticed how much of the coconut rum she went through when they visited, he never mentioned it.)

 

Eventually, Scott pulled his head out of his (very occasionally) surprisingly uncommunicative ass and told Stiles about Lahey, which made their weekly dinners a lot less about avoiding the subject entirely and a lot more about dissecting the hell out of it, to the point that she was pretty sure that both she and Stiles, a New York security expert and NYPD homicide detective respectively, could point at the next place Lahey was likely to hit as well as the best the FBI had to offer.

 

Which was why she, as well as everyone else, had been surprised as hell about Grant County, though both she and Scott had expected the lighter sentence that eventually got handed down. Five years wasn’t an especially long time, not in the grand scheme of things, but Allison knew she’d very literally go insane if she were penned in on place that long, particularly if it were in Supermax.

 

She worried, those first couple months, and she could tell Scott worried as well. Oh, he did it in ways like doing paperwork at home instead of the office, or making sure he was available for dinners with her parents, but he was worried.

 

Which made her angry.

 

“Why couldn’t Lahey have stayed loose?” she’d complained one Friday night, her shoes kicked off, legs hanging over the side of Lydia’s couch, a frozen strawberry margarita melting its way back to liquid sitting on the floor next to her. Lydia was dating a bartender, had been for months, which, at the time, had made it the longest relationship she’d had since before Jackson had his gay freakout in sophomore year of college.

 

Lydia had raised one eyebrow, which Allison had hated her for. Allison couldn’t do that. Allison also had had too much to drink, but whatever. “You want your husband’s arch-nemesis-with-a-crush to still be running all over the world and pulling Scott to, I don’t know, what was it on your anniversary two years ago? Bhutan? You want Scott to be in Bhutan?”

 

“Nooooooo,” Allison had said. “I want him to be…” And here she’d trailed off, staring at the ceiling. She had a nice ceiling, did Lydia. All sorts of swirls in the paint; fancy, understated stuff that Allison didn’t have any patience to do herself and she knew Lydia _had_ done herself. “I want him to be happy,” she’d finally said.

 

Lydia’s other eyebrow had gone up, and honestly, that was just not fair. No one should have that much control over their own eyebrows. “Having Lahey locked up doesn’t make Scott happy? Is he _insane_? Are _you_ insane? Has Stiles been ‘baking’ again?”

 

“It’s not that he’s not happy, so much,” Allison had said, tilting her head to send the swirls…swirling. “It’s that he’s bored. I’m bored. It’s like Sherlock Holmes, you know? This was his Moriarty.”

 

“Just be glad it wasn’t his Reichenbach,” Lydia had said, and that was the end of that.

 

~~~

 

A month later, though, Scott got the first card.

 

“Morning, McCall (& Argent),” it had read, in a blocky, all-caps script that Allison realized must be his own. “Guess what? They finally trust me with a pen. Today, (and by ‘today’ I mean the day I posted this) is a monumental day in our history. Take a guess as to what. Say hi to Melly for me. Isaac Lahey.”

 

On the front, drawn in ballpoint pen, was a malasada.

 

“That,” Scott had said after a moment. “That _motherfucker_.”

 

“Who remembers this shit?” Allison had been rereading the card, searching for something, anything that would make this whole thing make at least a tiny bit of sense. (Nothing had been forthcoming.)

 

“Him, apparently,” Scott had said, then: “Fridge?”

 

“Fridge.”

 

After that, they had come like clockwork. One on Scott’s birthday, one on Allison’s, one on Melly’s, and one on the anniversary of the day Isaac had bumped into Scott in the padaria on Sixteenth. Their fridge is getting to be an art museum all on its own, covered in five-by-seven masterworks done in ballpoint pen by a prisoner they’re both, to some extent, responsible for putting away.

 

It’s an odd specialization, but it is what it is.

 

Allison sends something back—the mailing address to Florence ADX carefully typed, printed, and taped to the box by her when Scott’s out at the Federal Building—after the second card. She’s not sure security will let it through, but she stuffs enough things inside it that she’s sure he’ll get _something_ , and that’s got to be worth it.

 

The next card—the one for Melly’s birthday—comes drawn in colour, which is confirmation enough.

 

Lahey never mentions the packages, Allison keeps sending them, Scott pretends he doesn’t know about them, everything is…not fine, exactly, but okay.

 

Everything is okay.

 

~~~

 

The phone is ringing.

 

It’s two in the goddamn morning, and Allison just got back from an overseas consultation—which, although a major win for her and Lydia, was also hell on her internal clock—so it _feels_ even worse, and the phone just will not stop _ringing_. She finally rolls over, flops her hand around on the nightstand until she picks up the correct phone—the one that’s lit up like Satan’s Hell Carnival and vibrating itself half to pieces—taps whatever the hell it is that’ll make it shut up, puts it up to her ear, and snarls, “ _What_.”

 

“Uh,” says Danny Mahealani. “Hi, Allison. Is Scott there?”

 

“You better have a damn good reason for this, Mahealani,” she says, gently shaking Scott the rest of the way awake. She might be tired, and more than a tad bit annoyed, but she’s not an asshole.

 

“The very fucking best,” he promises, and she passes the phone over to Scott.

 

“McCall,” he says, not sounding at all like he was asleep less than two seconds ago. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. They’re positive? You sure? Because he’s never—Yeah, I know. Okay. Boyd coming? Okay. I’ll be there in thirty.”

 

He hangs up, breathes. Doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “Isaac Lahey broke out of Florence ADX sometime tonight, they’re not sure when, or how. Boyd and Danny are waiting for me at the Federal Building. We’ve got a flight out of JFK in a couple hours.”

 

“But he’s out in less than two months,” Allison says after a moment. “Why the fuck would he break out if he’s going to _be_ out, fair and square, no one chasing him?”

 

Scott sighs, shoves his hands through his hair. It’s getting long again, floppy, like it was when they first met. “I don’t know, Ally, I just—” He rubs at his face, his voice heavy with more than sleep. “I don’t know.”

 

“You’ll get him, okay?” Allison says, twisting so that she’s looking at him head on, instead of from the side. “You’ll get him, you’ll bring him back, and you’ll ask him what the fuck he thought he was doing.”

 

Scott smiles. “I should take you with me, we’d have him before we even cleared baggage claim.”

 

“Damn straight,” she says, leaning in to kiss him. It’s slow, still sleepy, with an edge that Allison knows she could turn into more, if only they had the time. They don’t, though, so she breaks it off with a reluctance that she knows Scott’s feeling as well, which makes it somewhat better.

 

“Go get ‘em, tiger,” she says, and Scott goes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am trash, this fic is trash, and _yet_. 
> 
> I know nothing about Paris (or France) except for the museums, and the same goes for the rest of the Europe. 
> 
> I also know nothing about New York State Death Certificates, but by the time you've gotten the Commissioner of any baseball team to admit anything, whether or not there's a corpse involved, the guy is probably pretty dead.
> 
> There is no such place as O'Hallighan's, and no such thing as Nickel Shot Night (which is probably a good thing).
> 
> Although Florence ADX is real (and is actually called 'The Alcatraz of the Rockies'), what I know of prisons and the criminal justice system past basic policework comes solely from _Prison Break_ and far too many police procedurals.
> 
> My deepest apologies to _Teen Wolf_ , _White Collar_ , and to any con men, FBI agents, security consultants, or New Yorkers who may read this.


	2. Chapter 2

_Beacon Hills, California_  
_May, 2015_  
_Two days later_

 

From a technical standpoint, going from five or so years to about two days is an undeniable improvement. For Scott, and the rest of his team, it’s proof that yes, they are still _that_ good, and that none of them have stopped thinking about Lahey in the last five years.

 

Falling back into the rhythm is ridiculously easy, that odd sort of shimmy-step sideways into Lahey’s headspace is still second nature.

 

Once Scott had gotten off the plane with Boyd and Danny, the drive out to Florence had taken a couple of hours, hours that were filled with seven different iteration of ‘what the hell is he _thinking_ ’. Lahey, Scott had realized, way back in California, empty pallets that should have been filled with security threads scattered around him, was theirs. For different reasons, sure—he didn’t think Danny stayed awake nights thinking about the way he’d looked the last time he’d seen Lahey in sunlight—but the end result is the same.

 

Their collar, their criminal, their responsibility.

 

~~~

 

“He’s an odd duck.” That’s the warden, a whipcord lean man whose badge says Dimaunahan, but who had instructed all of them to call him Santo with a firm, dry handshake. He’s currently leading Scott, Boyd, and Danny down a long hallway lined with cells on one side, and the open block on the other.“Never caused any problems, didn’t have any visitors, only one correspondent—I’m guessing you’re the same Agent McCall?” He glances over at Scott, and continues after he nods. “Right, so you know all about that.”

 

“His cell, though,” Santo says as they come to a halt in front of what must be the appropriate set of bars. “That’s where it gets weird.” He unlocks two sets of heavy duty mechanisms, one at head height and one closer to the knees, slides the door back. “See for yourself.”

 

Scott steps inside Isaac Lahey’s cell—Isaac Lahey’s _home_ , if he’s being honest, a home he’d sent him to on the weight of several felonies and an undefinable anger that Lahey didn’t _trust_ him—and just stares for a minute.

 

He’s alone in here, has got to be. The wall opposite the bed is nearly black with a neat collection of tally marks. Scott doesn’t need to count to know that there are almost eighteen hundred of them, one for each day Lahey had been in prison.

 

The other walls are incomplete pastiches of various famous works of art. There’s a Da Vinci on the ceiling above the top bunk, a half-done Titian tucked next to the sink, with Monet’s _Water Lilies_ washing out from under the toilet. There are countless other bits and pieces, started, abandoned, drawn over.

 

It is…a lot to take in.

 

Danny’s the first to speak. “At least we’ve got clues, this time.”

 

Boyd snorts. “Clues to what? To Lahey’s mental state? ‘Cause it’s looking pretty unsteady from here.”

 

“How many crackpots you know who can—” Danny leans closer to one of the walls, inspecting a particularly detailed section. “—replicate Caravaggio on a cinderblock wall with the kind of art supplies they let in here?”

 

“It’s _Judith Beheading Holofernes_ ,” Boyd says with a shrug. “The subject matter is nutty enough already, so what if he’s got technical skill.”

 

There’s the sound of a throat clearing behind them, and the three of them turn to look at Santo, who’s still standing in the doorway.

 

“Yeah?” Scott says, the first word he’s managed to get out since he stepped in here.

 

“Do you need me?” Santo asks bluntly. “Because I’ve told you most of what I’ve got, and I know nothing about this art shit. I’ve got a prison to run—we’re gonna have at least six escape attempts after this, I need to prepare—so if you don’t need me here, I’m gonna leave the key to this cell with you and go back to my office.”

 

It’s a little…blunter than most interactions Scott has with local LEOs, but he gets where Santo is coming from. Truth be told, if something were holding him from, say, finding Isaac Lahey, he’d be just as blunt and probably not nearly as polite.

 

“Go ahead,” he says after a minute. “Take Danny with you, let him run through the security footage for the last day or so, see what he can get. Boyd and I will be along in a bit.”

 

“Thanks,” Santo says, and proceeds to do exactly that, leaving Boyd and Scott in Lahey’s cell.

 

“What are you thinking, boss?” Boyd asks, once the sounds of Santo’s footsteps have faded fully away.

 

“I’m thinking,” Scott says, turning slowly, still trying to take in everything. “I’m thinking the art’s a distraction.”

 

“For him, or for us?” Boyd’s quiet, looking thoughtfully at the wall that’s clear of everything except the tally marks.

 

Scott thinks on it a moment. “Both? He does the art to keep himself occupied, keep himself sharp, because for all we know he’s headed straight back into the game as soon as he’s out.” And goddamn if _that_ fact doesn’t send a sharp pain stabbing through somewhere Scott doesn’t want to think about.

 

“Huh,” Boyd says. “And if he _is_ planning something, and he _does_ put some clues towards what, it’s buried in the rest.”

 

“Or there’s nothing here because he knows that’s what we’ll be thinking.” Scott ducks down as he says this, takes a look under the top bunk, and freezes.

 

There, in the middle of a thickly painted mess that looks an awful lot like Rembrandt’s _The Storm on the Lake of Galilee_ , is a small patch of cleared space, right underneath the mast of the listing ship.

 

“Sorry, Scott,” it says in Sharpie marker, the handwriting cramped. “I had to.”

 

“You motherfucker,” Scott breathes, then nearly bangs his head as he straightens back out.

 

“Boss?” Boyd doesn’t look concerned—he doesn’t do concerned—but he’s wearing the face he usually puts on when he learns that Erica, Lydia, and Allison are going out for drinks together.

 

“I know where he is,” Scott says faintly, then grins at Boyd. “I know where he is.”

 

~~~

 

Sometimes, Scott thinks, being right _sucks_.

 

He’s in Beacon Hills, California, apparent—they have no solid evidence that he’s even American, just foster care records—birthplace of one Isaac Lahey, leaning against the side of an FBI van as the lights from various emergency vehicles light up the night in alternating shades of blue and red. There’s a house in front of him, if a structure that’s half dry-rot and half insect menagerie deserves the title of house.

 

Lahey had called it home at some point, though, so Scott’s willing to look past some of the flaws. The fact that half the roof had caved in in the six hours that he’d been there, though, that he couldn’t do anything about.

 

They’d gotten there—to Beacon Hills proper, not this house in particular—a little over eight hours ago, having taken the rest of yesterday and the better part of today make sure everything at Florence was wrapped up solid. Scott had been damn sure he was right, but the book was there for a reason, and doing things by it most of the time helped cover his and his team’s ass when he _didn’t_.

 

After they’d arrived here, a short stop at City Hall, a quick skim through public records, and then Scott, Danny, and Boyd had driven out here, to the very edge of the Beacon Hills Nature Preserve, to a house that belonged to a Camden Lahey, whose death certificate had also turned up in their search.

 

They’d cleared the house, Scott going through the shotgun hallway, Danny and Boyd going around back, and found Lahey sitting on the back porch, a six-pack of beer next to him, half drunk.

 

“Oh,” he’d said, his dark eyes staring up at Scott’s face from his seated position, and it’d been like Grant County all over again.

 

He’s in the passenger seat of the van, now, the one Scott’s leaning against. The window’s cracked, enough so that Scott can hear the rasp of his breathing underneath the chatter of a crime scene being processed. He was supposed to go to the Sheriff’s station, spend the night in lockup before transport, but Scott—and his superiors at the FBI—didn’t want him let out of their sight.

 

“There’s another house out here,” he says eventually, voice low. Lahey can hear him though, his breath catching and his clothes shifting at the first sound. “It’s way back in the woods, old property, nothing in a computer. Found the deed when we were searching up this place. Current owner’s Derek Hale. You know him?”

 

“He’s gonna kill me,” Lahey says, with no trace of the English accent that’d coloured his speech the last time they spoke. Scott misses it, almost, the auditory sign that a layer of some sorts had dropped from between them.

 

“Not if Allison gets to you first,” Scott says absently, watching as the bright lights of the flash on evidence cameras strobe over the last section of unphotographed whatever.

 

“Yeah? You think so?” There it is, the wisp of England flitting in around the vowels, adding to the vaguely wistful tone of the words themselves.

 

Scott snorts. “I know so. She almost brought herself along on this one, out of sheer annoyance alone. You were almost _out_ , Lahey, why’d you have to go and pull a stupid-ass move like this?”

 

“Peter,” Lahey says after a moment. “And Kate, a little bit. But mostly Peter.”

 

“Who’s Peter?” Scott asks, fingers almost itching for a pen.

 

“Bad fucking news,” Lahey says, and the English is as strong as it was back in Florence that first time. Scott turns to see that he’s got himself twisted around, his face pressed into the window, eyes steady on him. “Don’t fuck around with him, yeah? He’ll eat you alive, and laugh at anything short of a bomb to the chest. Forget I even mentioned him, you’ll be happier for it.”

 

“Yeah,” Scott says, “But will you?”

 

Lahey doesn’t answer.

 

~~~

 

_New York City, New York_  
_June, 2015_  
_One week later_

 

Scott McCall, Isaac has come to the conclusion, is fucking insane.

 

He’s not sure how it’s taken him this long to realize it, what with the fact that they’ve been circling each other’s lives for the past decade or so—which, Jesus, has it really been that long?—but realize it he had.

 

For starters, he shouldn’t be in New York City, he should be back in Florence, staring at the walls of his cell and getting ready to finish the Hieronymus Bosch running down the wall between the bunk and the cell door, because that’s what happens when people break out of prison.

 

They go back.

 

Yet here he sits, in the goddamn Federal Building, no less, twiddling his thumbs in a glass-walled conference room, his nerves stretched to the breaking point because he is _surrounded by Federal agents_ , a situation he has thus far worked to avoid at all costs.

 

Isaac hasn’t even _seen_ McCall since Beacon Hills, which is great, because that limits his opportunities to make a fool of himself and also the time spent staring unresponsively at the ceiling while a various rotation of people in bad suits ask him why he’d escaped, but also shitty because he hasn’t had a chance to ask him—in the nicest tone of voice he can muster—whether or not he was dropped on his head as a child.

 

At around nine-twenty—there’s a clock in this room, and it’s been assisting in Isaac’s growing sense of all over twitch—a familiar dark head comes up the stairs on the right end of the conference room, walks down the hallway to the left side, stops, _walks fucking backwards_ —seriously, what did Isaac see in him? In all senses of the question—to stare at Isaac through the glass.

 

Isaac waves.

 

McCall frowns, gets himself turned back in whatever direction he’d been intending to go in, and walks in the most determined manner possible towards wherever the hell he thinks he’s going, passing beyond Isaac’s range of sight.

 

Which is okay, he doesn’t need to eavesdrop or spy on _everything_ that involves him, but seriously. Would it hurt to keep him at least semi-in-the-loop. Right on the edge of the loop. Within sight of the loop. Somewhere where he, Isaac, the subject of the loop, is even tangentially related to and aware of the loop.

 

_Something_.

 

At nine thirty-five—Isaac really fucking hates that clock, he is going to _murder_ that clock—McCall, McCall’s scary-as-fuck-boss who Isaac had last seen five years ago but is still just as scary, and a woman he doesn’t recognize all walk into the conference room.

 

McCall looks angry, and annoyed, his boss looks pleased with himself (bad sign, very bad sign), and mystery lady looks…mysterious.

 

Isaac feels like he needs to be somewhere else very quickly, and also a bit like throwing up.

 

“Mr. Lahey,” says mystery lady, “We have a proposition for you.”

 

“I don’t do propositions,” Isaac says, automatically. “Very rarely do they end well, and people tend not to like it when you welsh halfway through. Best not to agree to them at all, save a lot of headaches.” McCall, he can see out of the corner of his eye, is looking at the ceiling like God—or perhaps the secret ingredients to blue crystal meth—is hidden in the industrial tile.

 

“Not that kind of proposition,” says McCall’s boss, and wow, five years have somehow upped the sheer amount of whatever it is that makes the man seem like he could kill several men and destroy a city block without breaking a sweat.

 

“Is there any other sort?” Isaac asks, and McCall is choking back there behind these two, just straight up dying while Isaac is left to suffer.

 

“Surprisingly enough, yes,” says mystery lady, and takes a seat opposite of where Isaac is sitting. The other two stay standing, McCall seemingly far enough back from the brink of death to at least look like he’s surrounded by his superiors, but not far enough back to look happy about it.

 

“My name is Noshiko Yukimura, Special Agent In Charge of the New York branch of the FBI,” she continues. “This is Alan Deaton, Assistant Special Agent In Charge, and I believe you’re…familiar with Special Agent Scott McCall, who is the Special Agent In Charge of the white collar crime division of this office.”

 

There are several options here, ranging from “That’s a lot of ‘special’s” to “Nice to meet you”. Isaac settles for a more neutral, “Yeah.”

 

“It has come to our attention, over the years, that you are _very_ good at what you do,” Noshiko Yukimura says, with no hint of irony in her voice at all. Which, for that alone, Isaac has to give her props. Or whatever the kids are calling it these days.

 

“Allegedly,” Isaac says, “I am.”

 

McCall rolls his eyes, but stays quiet.

 

“Mmm,” says SAC Yukimura.

 

“Allegedly or not,” says Alan Deaton, Agent Scary As Crap, “You…eluded several international agencies—including ours—for an extended period of time over a wide variety of crimes. There’s not many people who can…boast that kind of notoriety.”

 

“I don’t boast,” Isaac says. McCall’s eyeballs look like they’re liable to roll out of his head.

 

“Mmm,” says SAC Yukimura, again.

 

“We’d like you to work with us,” Deaton says, and Isaac nearly falls out of his chair.

 

He’d been expecting…he didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but it hadn’t been _that_. There’d been all the signs that they were going to cackle off into a corner once he said ‘allegedly’ one more time, and roll in some damning piece of final evidence, like Derek’s house keys or something. Nowhere in all of this—from Yukimura’s hums to McCall’s inability to keep his eyeballs still—had there been any indication that this was all leading up to a job offer.

 

“Sorry,” he says, once he’s regained control of his faculties enough to be sure that he won’t laugh the moment he opens his mouth, “But I don’t do pro bono, even if— _especially_ if—it’s the government asking.”

 

“It wouldn’t be pro bono,” Yukimura says smoothly, as if asking criminals to go on her payroll is something she does every day. Which, hey, maybe it is, still doesn’t explain why she’s asking _Isaac_.

 

“We’d pay you, just like we pay all of our consultants,” Deaton adds.

 

“But,” Isaac says, pulling the word out as long as it’ll go before trailing off.

 

“Mmm,” says SAC Yukimura, and smiles. “But.”

 

“That’s where Special Agent McCall comes in,” Deaton says, waving him closer.

 

Special Agent McCall looks like he’s two seconds from pitching a chair out the window and rabbiting, but that’s just Isaac’s read of the situation.

 

Yukimura stands, and looks down at Isaac, still smiling. Isaac resists the urge to squirm. “You’re a flight risk, Lahey. You were when you went into Florence, and you proved it when you broke out. You are, for all intents and purposes, about as good at running away as you are at breaking the law. Alan will explain the rest of our…proposition to you, and I am very, _very_ sure that you will agree to our terms.

 

“However, Mr. Lahey,” she says, and her smile widens, “As much as Agent McCall seems to enjoy hunting you down, do not make _me_ chase after you as well.”

 

Isaac thinks that if he presses anymore into the back of his chair, he and the ergonomic fabric will quite literally become one.

 

“Yes, ma’am,” he manages after a minute, and then—thank Christ and all the Saints—Yukimura turns and leaves, the glass door closing with a heavy _thunk_ behind her.

 

“Hands up if that’s the scariest woman you’ve ever seen in your goddamn life.” Isaac doesn’t plan on saying anything, not after all of _that_ , but it just…comes out.

 

“You haven’t met Allison’s mother,” McCall mutters, finally moving to sit down, which is the first thing he’s said since this whole clusterfuck started.

 

Isaac feels compelled to mention it. McCall just raises an eyebrow.

 

Deaton clears his throat. “If I could continue?”

 

“By all means,” Isaac says graciously. McCall’s back to being silent.

 

“As I’m sure you’re aware, you broke out of prison less than two weeks ago,” Deaton says.

 

Both Isaac and McCall snort, which is a level of camaraderie he never thought they’d share.

 

“However, due to the…timing of the escape, and your general good behavior over the last five years or so, both the Bureau of Prisons and the FBI are willing to commute the sentence you _would_ have received for this most recent crime—three years, give or take, back in Florence—to having you work for us as a consultant, provided that—” and here’s where the other shoe drops, Isaac can feel it, he is two seconds away from being an unsightly smear on the industrial carpeting “—you stay underneath the supervision of Agent McCall, with all the rules and regulations that entails.”

 

“Wait, what?” Isaac isn’t sure, exactly, what Deaton just said, and which parts of it he disagrees with, specifically, but he’s disagreeing. Potentially loudly, and all the way back to Colorado, no matter what Yukimura said.

 

“Tracking anklet,” McCall says shortly. “You stay within a two mile radius of where we put you, no problem. You step an inch out of that, or the anklet is damaged in any way, or turned off, or _whatever_ , the full might of the FBI and the Marshal’s Service falls on you like a ton of bricks, and then maybe, possibly, sixty years or so down the line, we dig you up from whatever hole we decided to toss you into, dust you off, and let you see the sun one last time before you die.

 

“Or so,” he looks over at Deaton, face maintaining a level of inscrutability Isaac would have deemed impossible not ten minutes ago, “It was explained to me.”

 

“A little more dramatic than I think I put it,” Deaton says mildly, “but that’s about the gist of it.”

 

“A four mile prison instead of an eight-foot one,” Isaac says, because that’s what it is, once it’s all done. It’s a good deal, a damn fantastic deal, if he’s being honest with himself. He’s already spent almost five years in prison, and he’s not eager to go back any time soon.

 

Sure, he’d broken out, haring after a lead on Peter and the whole Kate mess, hoping against hope that he could get there before Derek, but he honestly hadn’t thought he’d be coming _back_. Either Peter would have ripped his throat out—an apparent favorite of his—or Kate would have cut him in half—seriously, where the fuck did Derek _find_ these people, and why were they all so pissed at him—and that would have been that.

 

Derek would have been safe from his own idiocy—the man was smart, but he was so, _so_ dumb when it came to this shit—and Isaac would be able to twiddle his thumbs and learn how to play the harp without any further worries.

 

Well. Without _that_ particular worry.

 

Being out, even if it’s just in four miles of Manhattan, means that he’s _out_ , visible to Peter and anyone else who bothers to look for him, with nowhere to run to if they do, except in circles. He can talk to people here, though, get food that didn’t start—and end—its life as glop, hear something other than the low rumble of the other inmates and the buzz of fluorescents.

 

It’s a bigger box than Florence, is what it boils down to, and a tempting one, but it’s still a box.

 

Federal consulting, though, that’s a new one, something he hasn’t done—or dreamed of doing—before. Not just consulting, either, but consulting with Scott McCall.

 

For that alone, Isaac’s willing to say yes, which is as stupid as Derek going after Peter and Kate by himself, but it is what it is. At least his obsession just wants to put him in jail, bring him to some form of justice because that’s how things _work_ , instead of wanting alternately to murder him for revenge or just for sick and twisted kicks.

 

“Yes,” he says, nearly five minutes of tense silence later. “I’ll do it.” He looks at Scott, turns to face him fully, blocking out Deaton as much as he can.

 

“I’m yours.”

 

_You. Are so. Fucked_. Mental Derek says, and Isaac can’t even work up the effort to tell him—tell himself?—to shut up.

 

~~~

 

The hotel they take him to has to be the last twenty-dollar-a-night place left in New York City.

 

They moved fast when they wanted to, did the FBI, which means someone had been pretty damned certain he’d say yes and had set all this up beforehand. After a couple of carefully considered signatures and one excruciating lecture on what, exactly, being a consultant meant, one of McCall’s boys, Mahealani, had put on the anklet for him, turning it on, making sure it wasn’t too tight, and wasn’t loose enough that Isaac could fit it over his foot.

 

“This is accurate to the inch,” he’d said, head bent over Isaac’s leg. “I’m saying that, because I know you’re gonna test it. _I_ would test it. The center is in Scott’s office, you’ll be able to see it when you go in, and you’ve got two miles in any direction from that point. Here, you’re done.”

 

“Thanks, mate,” Isaac had said, pulling his foot away.

 

“Don’t thank me yet,” Mahealani had replied as he stood. “You’ll learn to hate that thing, probably hate us.”

 

Isaac had batted his eyes, smiling up at him. “Oh, no, Agent Mahealani, I could never hate _you_.”

 

Mahealani had laughed. “Me? I think you could probably hate me, no problem. Scott, though…” He’d sobered, looking at Isaac with what was clearly his serious business face. “Scott I don’t think you could hate, and I don’t think he could hate you. He’ll get mad at you, you’ll get mad at him, we’ll all get buried in fucking origami and unnecessary paperwork, but hate? Nah.”

 

“You sure about that?” Isaac had been dead serious.

 

McCall was his tether, his lifeline, the reason they trusted him to be out of Florence. Whatever misgivings he might have about this whole thing, he was willing to overlook them—for the most part—because McCall was going to be watching over him, and the FBI seemed to feel the same way, if for different reasons. If McCall suddenly decided Isaac wasn’t worth it, then Isaac was more than in trouble, he was more than likely spectacularly and disgustingly dead.

 

“Sure as anything,” Mahealani had said, then sent him on his way.

 

Back to the hotel though, which is just this side of a flophouse.

 

“I can’t live like this,” he says to the walls, which have interesting enough stains to make it look like there’s someone there, listening to him. “I was in prison for five years, and an international fugitive for almost a decade, I have been in a lot of shitty places, and somehow this is _worse_.”

 

He’s alone, the feds in charge of dropping him off having done their duty and skedaddled, probably in fear of what seemed likely to crawl its way out of the toilet. His things—such as they are—are in one small duffel bag emblazoned with the FBI logo resting on the single bed.

 

It’s ridiculous. It _looks_ ridiculous.

 

And…and…Isaac doesn’t have to stay.

 

“I don’t have to stay.” He says it out loud, because hearing it makes it more real, but it _is_ true. There’d been nothing about living arrangements in all the paperwork he’d signed, just endless paragraphs about how he was to be compensated and what, if any, jurisdiction he had when out in the field.

 

“I don’t have to stay,” he almost sings, grabbing his bag and his keycard and turning a quick pirouette before heading out the door.

 

~~~

 

Melissa Delgado is not a stupid woman.

 

She’s played one, first for her ex-husband and later for her ex-husband’s ex-associates, but stupid has never been something that comes naturally to her.

 

Which is why, when she sees a young man, maybe a few years younger than her son, hanging around Jack and Doris’ door when she knows for a fact Jack and Doris don’t have any kids or young friends or expect any deliveries that aren’t legal papers finalizing Jack’s cremation and Arlington burial application, she goes over and talks to him.

 

She’s not stupid, but she is bored.

 

“Lost?” she asks, putting a little bit of a warble in her voice to go with the white streaks she’s never bothered to cover up.

 

He turns, aims a smile that manages to hit charming, nice, and conspiratorial all at once.

 

_Oh_ , she thinks, _he’s a smooth one_.

 

“I’m waiting on my friends,” he says, waving in the direction of at least three doors, allowing her to draw whatever conclusions she might want.

 

“Jack?” she says, warble still solidly in place, “And Doris? They’re out at one of those newfangled things now, those Zumba classes everyone’s so into.”

 

He raises an eyebrow, leans in. “ _Really_? Because Doris told me that Jack hates Zumba, I’m surprised he let her drag him over.”

 

Melissa titters, or at least tries her best, and sees the slight glint in the young man’s eyes that says ‘ _Gotcha_ ’. Rafe’s eyes had had that same glint, before he went up to Rikers and got himself knifed in the kidneys before signing the divorce papers.

 

The bastard.

 

“Just wait until I tell her,” she says, “Doris has always been strong-minded since I’ve known her—the name, you know, in this day and age—but she thought Jack was _so_ into it, and you know how she gets.”

 

“Stubborn as a mule,” the young man says, nodding knowledgeably along this line of absolute bullshit.

 

“Where are you staying?” she asks, genuinely curious. He doesn’t look out of place, so much as he fits too neatly.

 

He shrugs. “I was over at the Clarendon on forty-sixth and fifth, decided I needed a bit of a…change.”

 

Melissa silently agrees. The Clarendon—while respectful, neat, and functional—is more of a desperate last resort than an initial choice.

 

“And you thought you’d ask Jack and Doris to put you up?” she asks, and the young man nods.

 

“Mmm,” she says, thinking for a moment, then: “I’ve got a spare suite—bed, bath, kitchenette—if you want it instead. Doris has got those cats, you know, and she just refuses to acknowledge the fact that they shed. The poor maid goes through at least five bags when she does their apartment, and I doubt you’d want to go from the Clarendon to drowning in cat hair. I promise I charge decent rates, especially for this part of the city, double that especially for the penthouse.”

 

He gapes at her, and she almost laughs. He’d clearly been planning to break into one of the empty apartments—they’d been having a problem retaining tenants—and just…talking his way into being able to stay. Doing things the legal way seems to be almost beyond him, if the fact that it’s been a solid forty-five seconds since she made the offer and he still hasn’t bothered to shut his mouth.

 

“I, uh,” he finally says, smiling for real this time, with just the barest trace of something other than generic American in his voice, “Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that. Thanks. Thanks so much, uh?” He looks at her questioningly.

 

“Melissa,” she says, holding her hand out. “Shake on it…?” It’s her turn to give the questioning look.

 

He hesitates, then takes it, giving a firm, dry shake. “Isaac. Isaac Lahey.”

 

_Oh_.

 

She’d seen it, a little, when he’d smiled at her the second time. Scott doesn’t talk to her about work so much, mainly because he worries about worrying her, which is fine, because no matter what, he always told her the serious stuff, and Isaac Lahey had been at the top of the Serious Stuff list for a good ten years or so, and that picture of him had been magneted to Scott and Allison’s fridge for about as long. He’s older now, obviously, a bit too thin, but here he was, in New York City, after Scott had gone haring off to California, chasing him—and catching him—again, trying to con his way into her apartment building.

 

Melissa almost laughs, lets it slip that she knows exactly who he is and what he’s up to—or thinks he’s up to—but she manages to keep a straight face for at least as long as it takes to turn towards the elevator, beckoning Isaac to follow.

 

~~~

 

_New York City, New York_  
_June, 2015_  
_One day later_

 

“Never again,” Allison says to the haggard witch staring back at her from the mirror, generously abusing the Royal We. “Never again are we going out with Lydia and Cora, because apparently old age took away our alcohol tolerance.”

 

“Not old age,” Scott says from the other room, which, damn it, she’d forgotten he was still here. “What those two drink, though, that’d knock a Russian naval officer dead after one shot.”

 

“I’m _French_ ,” Allison says, turning away from the mirror so she can go to the bathroom door and glare at Scott instead of herself. “We’re supposed to be on that list, too, the list of people who drink like fish, feel nothing, and wake up beautiful.”

 

Scott laughs, standing up and walking over to where she’s leaning against the doorframe. “Who says you’re not beautiful, Ally, point ‘em out so I know whose insurance bills I’m gonna be paying this month.”

 

“That was _one time_ ,” she says, smiling up at him. “He wasn’t even that hurt, just whiny.”

 

Scott hums, ducking down a bit to kiss her. “Whiny or not,” he says, pulling back, “It was a bitch and a half trying to explain how it was that his arm ended up broken on an escalator without anyone else seeing anything.”

 

“Magic,” she says, and pulls him back down by his shirt for one more.

 

“Alright,” she says, breathing a little hard after they break apart for the second time, her fingers somehow tangled up in his hair. “I’ve, uh—I’ve got to, uh—You’ve got to—”

 

“Something,” Scott agrees. “We’ve got to do…something.”

 

“Else,” Allison adds. “Something else.”

 

“Uh-huh,” Scott says. “I’m gonna get changed, brush my teeth, maybe gargle something? I’ll meet you downstairs.”

 

“Ugh,” Allison says, because she hates it when Scott gargles anything, even if it’s supposed to be. It reminds her of Ger— _never mind that_. “Downstairs it is.”

 

She sneaks one more kiss, because she can, and because Scott’s easy, and practically skips down the stairs.

 

It’s a Monday morning, the sun is shining, Melly is at the state of contented exhaustion that says Scott already went on his run with her—Allison goes in the afternoon, only heathens and Scott run in the morning in Central Park—and there’s bacon in the fridge.

 

She’s halfway through the second round, coffee burbling in the pot next to her, and eggs balanced across the counter, waiting to be cracked into the pan of bacon grease when there’s a knock at the door.

 

“Scott? Company,” she calls as she turns the stove down and walks over to the door, Melly following close behind.

 

She undoes the locks—six, because both she and Scott are paranoid in some respects—and pulls open the steel reinforced door with a grunt of practiced effort.

 

“Hi,” says Isaac Lahey.

 

“Holy fucking shit,” she says, then: “We’re more than two miles from the Federal Building.”

 

“Ah,” Lahey says sheepishly, rubbing his neck, right about the same time that Scott comes down the stairs in a bit of a rush. “About that.”

 

“Lahey’s out of the peri—” Scott is saying, and then he gets a good look at who’s standing on their stoop. “God fucking damn it, Lahey, you motherfucker, could you follow directions for once in your goddamn life.” He pulls out his cell phone—the emergency line, she notes—and dials while walking back to the balcony.

 

“Is he…mad?” Lahey says, stepping in only when Allison waves him inside, turning to watch her redo all the locks.

 

Allison snorts. “Now you’re worried about that? And no, he’s not mad. You’ll know when he is, he drops into Spanish, and not the fancy kind, something his mother taught him.

 

“Coffee?” she asks, heading back to kitchen, watching Lahey follow her from the corner of her eye, Melly in between them.

 

“Sure,” Lahey says, and so Allison pours him a cup, makes him a plate of bacon, and makes him sit down at the kitchen table.

 

Then, and only then, does she pull a knife on him.

 

It’s a nice knife, one of the Japanese butcher block set Melissa had bought for them three Christmas’ ago, the handles reweighted by her father before they’d been given to make them better for throwing. (Everything in the Argent household was made into the best weapon it could be. Everything.) The blade is duller than most, a sharp strip of dark grey against Isaac’s too pale skin.

 

“I know who you are,” she says, in the pleasant and conversational tone she’d learned from her mother. “And I’m pretty sure, knowing who you are, you know who I am, and who my father is, and what my family does.”

 

Isaac nods, eyes not leaving hers.

 

Allison smiles, and that’s all Kate, as much as she hates it. “So, you should have a decent idea of what comes next. If you hurt him—even if you don’t mean to, I don’t care—if he gets hurt and it’s your fault?” She tilts the blade so it presses just a little further into his skin, still not breaking the surface. “I’ll come after you, and it won’t be with a knife, understand?”

 

Isaac nods again, neck stretching away from the knife.

 

“Good,” she says, and takes the knife away from his throat, raises her arm, and whips it down, sending the knife slamming into the thick wooden board across the room meant for just that.

 

Scott, coming back in from the balcony, just raises an eyebrow before going to get his coffee.

 

“Now that’s out of the way,” she says, holding her hand out, “I’m Allison Argent, it’s nice to finally meet you.”

 

“Isaac Lahey,” says the same after a moment, as if he’s unused to giving out his real name. “It’s nice to meet you, too.”

 

Scott, over by the bacon and eggs, snorts.

 

The both of them look over, and Allison can see Isaac’s gaze snag on the refrigerator and hold there, unblinking.

 

“You kept them,” he says, pushing back from the table to walk over to the fridge. “All of them.”

 

Scott shrugs, not looking at him. “They were important.”

 

“And important things go on the fridge,” Allison says, watching Isaac run his fingers over the cards.

 

“Huh,” he says softly, pausing on the picture of him and Solo in the middle of it all. “Huh.”

 

“Eat,” Allison says, imperiously, once she’s deemed that the moment has gone on long enough. “We can’t have you breaking perimeter—stupid, by the way, even if I know why you did it—and then starving to death on your first day.”

 

Isaac pulls a face. “You sound like Der—You sound like my mate’s mum.”

 

“And?” Allison raises both eyebrows—because she has to, goddamn her genetics.

 

“Nothing,” Isaac says, looking to Scott for help. Scott just shrugs. Scott’s good like that. “Nothing at all.”

 

“Mmm,” Allison says, and takes a sip of coffee.

 

~~~

 

Melissa calls after Scott and Isaac leave, Scott kissing her goodbye while Isaac watches with…something in his eyes.

 

“Allison? Hey, is Scott there?” she said once Allison had picked up, tone bright and chipper. Melissa, for all of her wonderful qualities, has always been a morning person, just like her son, which is horrible.

 

“He just left,” Allison says, scraping the last of the bacon grease into a jar. “Isaac Lahey—you know, his white whale—was with him.”

 

Melissa laughs. “I knew that boy was up to no good when he left this morning, and look at that, I was right.”

 

“Uh-huh,” Allison says, and then, “Wait, what? This morning? That boy? Left?”

 

Melissa laughs again. “Apparently the FBI set him up at the Clarendon—”

 

“Hellhole,” Allison interrupts. “Decent for security, I’ve put some high-risk clients in there, but—”

 

“Hellhole,” Melissa confirms. “I guess he got fed up pretty quick, went apartment shopping among the rich and absent. I found him loitering around in my building, sizing up Mikhail’s old place, you know, the one next to Doris’. We got to talking, he tried to feed me a line, I let him think it worked, and now he and the FBI are renting out Scott’s old suite.”

 

Allison shakes her head, screwing the top back on the grease jar with one hand. “Unbelievable. Of all the fancy apartment buildings in all the world—”

 

“And he had to walk into mine,” Melissa finishes. “I haven’t told him I’m Scott’s mom, yet. I figured I’d save that until after I told Scott, which, now that I’ve told you, he should know pretty soon. You going over to have lunch with him today?”

 

“Unless Francine Casternacki decides that we haven’t been thorough enough in our testing of her home security, yeah,” Allison says, smiling as she puts the jar in the recycling bin under the sink. “Don’t give him too much of a heart attack, okay, Melissa? Scott—I— _We_ like him.”

 

“I know, honey,” Melissa says, “Otherwise, I would have never invited him to rent.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The trash is back, and trashier than ever. 
> 
> For those readers who are curious, I got sick in the couple days since the last chapter, to the point where the original ending was something like:
>
>> "What's that?" said Allison.  
>  "Wow," said Isaac.  
>  "That's a mushroom cloud," said Scott. "Weird that there'd be one in New York."  
>  " _BWOOOOOOOOOSH_ ," said the mushroom cloud.  
>  Nobody said much of anything after that.  
>  Because they were dead.  
>  Damn germs.
> 
> Luckily for those who enjoy watching basic civic geography and law enforcement procedure being completely ignored for the sake of... _whatever_ , I got over that.
> 
> Chapter relevant notes:
> 
> All the paintings mentioned are real, and Rembrandt's _The Storm on the Lake of Galilee_ was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston back in 1990. It's a bit before Isaac's time, but it's a fascinating mystery (they still haven't recovered any of the stolen art).
> 
> The Clarendon isn't real, and Google Maps tells me that where I put it is actually (maybe) the location of a taco shop. So. Make of that what you will.
> 
> All I know about Melissa's place and Scott and Allison's is that the former is inside the perimeter, while the latter is outside, and Central Park is...somewhere.


	3. Chapter 3

_New York City, New York_   
_August, 2015_

 

The first month of working with Lahey is almost impossible.

 

Scott had known, from the minute he’d shown up at their apartment—for the _first_ time, and didn’t _that_ rankle—that things were going to be hard. Which was fine, he was good at hard, and Allison’s family had practically invented the concept of endurance, but Lahey seems to be going out of his way to make things as difficult as humanly—or perhaps criminally—possible.

 

“You do know why he came, right?” Allison had asked him after the first time. They’d been in line for the food truck a few blocks down from the Federal Building that had the queso he liked, the sun doing its best to melt the people of New York into gelatinous puddles where they stood, and, if that failed, to simply make them miserable.

 

“Four minutes, thirty-five seconds,” Scott had said, shifting over to block the sun from shining directly into Allison’s eyes. She’d forgotten her sunglasses, as she always did when she wasn’t working, and she hated squinting. So Scott had done what he could, as he always did. “That’s how long it took for someone—either at the Marshal’s Service or the FBI or the goddamn Weather Channel, whatever—to remember that they’re _supposed to call me_ when something like this happens.”

 

“They’ll get better,” she’d said, as they’d moved up in line. “Not by all that much; this is New York City, and you guys are feds—sorry, Scott—but they’ll get better.”

 

She’d been right: Lahey had broken perimeter six more times in the next week, twice for idiotic reasons, and four so he could come and bum breakfast off of them again. Scott had ended up having to call the Marshal’s Service and say that he’d set up a specific route for Lahey to follow if he was going to come to see them, and that only if he left the perimeter and deviated from _that_ —or took too long getting there, because really, if Lahey _didn’t_ take as much leeway as he could get, even Scott would be disappointed in him—were they to call him.

 

Adding those stipulations cut down on the morning calls from Chernow and Stapleton—whoever was working the Lahey detail that day, or even that hour—but it did nothing to stop the fact that he was having breakfast with Lahey five days out of seven.

 

Which wasn’t to say that he didn’t like it.

 

Or that Allison didn’t like it.

 

(Lahey was a given, he was the one who kept _showing up_.)

 

Stiles had laughed when he’d told him. “You chase this guy for _years_ , put him in prison _twice_ , and now you’re complaining that you always know where he is?”

 

“I’m not complaining that I know where he is—half of which, have I told you, is spent at my mother’s because _he’s renting from her_ —I’m complaining that I always know where he is because he’s with me. With us.” Scott had waved his beer around—they were at O’Hallighan’s, Ethan was using them to test some new micro-brew he’d gotten from Wisconsin—to indicate the complexities of the…whatever it was…between him and Allison and now Lahey.

 

“Melissa? Renting to him?” Stiles had grinned. “Does he know?”

 

“No,” Scott had said. “Though I don’t know _how_. The man is an international criminal, you’d think he could figure out that he’s living with my mother without me telling him.”

 

It was one very small thing in the ridiculous list of contradictions that made up Isaac Lahey, but _still_. Sometimes Scott wondered how much of Kuryakin had been both Lahey and Solo together, and how much of it—aside from the art portion, they had that one confirmed beyond a doubt—had been just Lahey alone.

 

“Lemme know when he’s coming over next,” Stiles had said over the rim of his glass. “I wanna meet the guy.”

 

“I _would_ ,” Scott had groused, “If he’d actually let us know when that _was_.”

 

Now it was August, and two and a half months had…smoothed things.

 

A little.

 

Breakfast had been simple this morning, just eggs and fruit. Allison was in the Hamptons with Lydia, doing a security check for a Tajikistani businesswoman who was concerned about a series of death threats she’d received in the last month. They’d been silent, for the most part, the two of them, Scott doing what he needed to do to get ready for the day—dress, set up Melly’s food and water, check the plants on the balcony—and Lahey staying out of his way.

 

Lahey had been just as silent on the car ride over, alternating between eerily still and irritatingly twitchy, a habit he’d kept up once they get inside.

 

“I still can’t believe _this_ is your office,” he says as they go through the door of the same, and Scott has to resist the urge to roll his eyes and point at the panel of frosted glass that said ‘Scott McCall, Special Agent In Charge, White Collar Crime’, which clearly indicates, besides that fact that his job title is way too damn long, that this _is_ , in fact, his office.

 

He settles, instead, for the much more boring, but much less passive aggressively bitchy, ‘Hmm’.

 

Lahey sits in his desk chair, gives it a whirl.

 

“Really, Scott?” he says as it slowly spins around, his long legs pulled up like a kid’s to keep them from banging against the desk itself. “You find boring criminals—present company and their _alleged_ crimes excluded—from the most boring office in the world?”

 

Scott sighs, the internal war between snark and professionalism leaning heavily towards the latter. As it usually does, where Lahey’s concerned. Goddamn it. “No, Lahey, I didn’t find anyone from this office, because for five years I was chasing _your_ ass all over the damn planet.”

 

Just like that, the war’s lost, the McCall Snark-O-Meter firmly set to stunning.

 

Or whatever.

 

(There’s a reason he usually sticks to getting progressively more willing to swear in front of authority figures and children: Allison and Stiles harbor enough sarcasm in their little fingers to cover for him, and he’s pretty sure Lydia’s _made_ of the stuff.)

 

Lahey rolls his eyes. “I _said_ I was sorry for Bhutan. And Qatar. And Paraguay. And Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

 

“ _Years_ —literal years, Lahey, I am not exaggerating—later, and on _birthday cards_.” Scott finally gives up on being able to sit at _his own desk_ —even when Lahey was in the States, was _right in fucking front of him_ , he still can’t use the damn thing—and just starts shuffling through the folders that seem to both magically appear and multiply like tree-pulp rabbits in his inbox.

 

“What?” Lahey sounds hurt, offended even. “You didn’t like them?”

 

Scott just grunts.

 

There’s the Dutchman folder, thick and battered, that goes to the left—as it does every morning—for Shit He Was Probably Going To Be Working On Until He Died, a pile that had gotten significantly shorter about five years ago when Lahey had taken up semi-permanent residency at Florence ADX.

 

A couple more—petty thefts, a request from the Guggenheim to go over some security measures, an invitation to speak at some charity benefit for one of the many offshoots of the MoMA—get put in the middle, for immediate shuffling off to someone else.

 

One, though, one catches his eye.

 

“Hey,” he says in place of a response to Lahey’s question (which was stupid, of course he likes the cards, both he and Allison like the cards, they’re on the _fridge_ , for God’s sake), “You ever heard of a Harris? Adrian Harris?”

 

Lahey stops the chair and sits up at that, looking thoughtful. “Chemist, right? At least he was when I went in. Specialized in—”

 

“Counterfeiting,” Scott finishes, flipping through the file.

 

Harris is low level, local stuff, nothing that should have kicked him up to Scott’s desk over a local fraud cop. There are a couple of charges from a few years ago, but nothing serious, and nothing related to his specialty. All that is cloaked in so many ‘allegedly’s and ‘suspected’s that he knows whoever started putting this thing together must have been grinding their teeth in frustration the whole time.

 

He’d settled down, it seems, stopped bouncing all over the southern part of the state and set up shop—quite literally, he’d taken over management of a dry cleaner’s, could you get any more clichéd—in Brooklyn a little over six months ago, and hadn’t done anything noteworthy since.

 

Except…

 

“You ever do anything with those security strips? The ones from California?” Scott asks, still looking over Harris’ expense records, noting multiple trips to a _Szczepanski’s Rare and Used Books_ up in the Bronx.

 

“ _Allegedly_ ,” Lahey says, and Scott has come to hate that word more than he hates the Red Sox, which is impressive, “I may have sold them.”

 

“To Harris?” Scott raises an eyebrow. There’s coincidence, as Stiles’ dad says, and then there’s _coincidence_.

 

Lahey snorts.

 

“No, Adrian hates me. Something to do with, uh…” He trails off, flaps a hand. “Never mind _why_ , but, if I _had_ them, which I’m not saying I did, and I sold them, which I’m not saying I did either, then I would’ve, hypothetically, dealt with a middleman.”

 

Scott looks at him for a long moment, waiting.

 

Lahey rolls his eyes. “Fine, fine, and _maybe_ that middleman—if he exists, and I’m not saying he does—doesn’t have quite the same beef with Adrian as I did—do.”

 

“Hmm.” Scott flips the folder around, puts it on the desk in front of Lahey, tapping the expenditure sheet. “What does that look like to you?”

 

“Bunch of grocery runs, does the man not know how to budget?” The tone is flippant, but Lahey’s looking, one long finger going down the items line by line as the fingers of his other hand tap in a rhythmic pattern that’s too steady to be random.

 

He does it all the time, when he’s not paying attention, usually with both hands. Scott’s not sure what it is, not yet, but he has an idea.

 

“Books,” Lahey mutters after a moment. “There’s a hell of a lot of books, and from this one place. Old books, too. What’s Adrian doing with a bunch of old books?” He looks up at Scott, head cocked to the side. “It is the books, right?”

 

“Yeah,” Scott says, and Lahey _beams_. It’s disgusting, it’s unnecessary, and Scott wants him to stop right now because something in his chest flips over—the way it’s been doing a lot lately, the way Scott’s been steadfastly ignoring since Florence—and Jesus _Christ_ he wishes Allison were here to see it.

 

“Books, chemist, maybe some security fibers I’m maybe responsible for, a literal dry cleaners.” Lahey ticks them all off on his fingers. “Add them all together, what do you get?”

 

Scott grins, tries not to notice the way Lahey’s eyes snap back to his face from his fingers. “You said Harris’ specialty was counterfeiting, right?”

 

“I did, didn’t I?” Lahey says, and if he sounds a little distracted, well.

 

He’s not the only one.

 

~~~

 

_New York City, New York_   
_August, 2015_   
_Four days later_

 

“This…this is _ridiculous_ ,” Isaac pants, running full out down an alley in Brooklyn that looks like it had last seen a trash truck circa the New Amsterdam years.

 

The rat that’s running next to him squeaks in agreement, before veering off to do whatever it is that rats do when they’re not mocking thirty-one year old ex-cons with shitty cardio. He’s joined a moment later by another, larger rat, like the rodent population is handing off the responsibility of shadowing him as he chases Adrian Harris through a part of town that can best be described—aside from the literal ‘trashy’—as seedy.

 

McCall’s supposed to be out here, too, with Mahealani, Boyd, and at least four other agents scooped up from the operations floor, but Isaac hasn’t seen hide nor hair of them since Harris bolted through the window onto the fire escape, and he—like an _idiot_ —had followed.

 

There’s a screech of brakes up ahead, which tells him that he’s still on the right track, and he bursts out of the mouth of the alley to see Harris’ dark head and ugly polyester suit jacket head west, towards the river.

 

Which, shit, if he disappears into the Hudson, then Isaac is _not_ following, not for love or money. Harris can drown or swim to Mexico or get picked up by Russian pirates, for all he cares. He’s had bad experiences with water before, both in prison and before, and he’s not eager to repeat them in a body of water that makes the puddle of sludge and goose shit in the park by Melissa’s building look like a baptismal font.

 

Luckily—or unluckily, depending on how prominently navigating narrow and disgusting alleyways figures into one’s life plan—Harris ducks into another after a block and a half. Isaac’s still got him in sight, for the most part, relying on fabric and back of head recognition, and he only half feels like he wants to lay down and die.

 

Only half.

 

The other half is fully aware of what’s squelching underneath his thrift store tennis shoes, and has no intention of getting any closer to it.

 

He’s halfway down this new alley—curiously rat-less—and dodging the half-decomposed remains of a sofa, before he realizes that it dead ends in a brick wall. A brick wall that is at once disgusting and at least six stories high. There is no sign, after Isaac’s done trying his best to halt without throwing himself into the sludge that seems to be actively _crawling_ up the brick, of Harris.

 

“Fuck,” Isaac says, staring up at the sliver of sky that’s just visible between the two buildings.

 

There’s a rustle behind him that sounds a lot like a rat getting comfortable in whatever mix of muck and detritus they happen to find themselves in. He turns to see Harris rise from behind the sofa, an honest-to-god _revolver_ in his hand, one that’s pointing pretty unwaveringly at Isaac.

 

So. Not a rat, but close enough.

 

“Adrian,” he says, smiling and shoving his hands into his pockets. “Fancy meeting you here.”

 

Harris snorts, and pulls the hammer back. “Be a lot fancier if you’d managed to do it naturally, instead of chasing me all the way from my apartment.”

 

Isaac shrugs, still smiling. “Please, I just wanted to chat. Bit hard to do that, you know, when one half of the conversation bolts before I’ve even got the chance to say hello.”

 

“Most people,” Harris says, gun distressingly steady, “Knock before entering someone’s place of residence.”

 

“I did knock,” Isaac says, then corrects himself. “Well, _we_ knocked. Didn’t you hear it? I admit, the first couple efforts were a little lackluster, but you _must_ have heard it when the door fell in.”

 

“And, why, precisely, were you knocking my door in?” Harris asks. “You’re not stupid enough to run a con on the _FBI_ , which means that when they were yelling things about arrests and warrants and arrest warrants, they weren’t yelling it at you, because you’re with _them_.”

 

Isaac shrugs, smile not slipping. “What’s that saying? You can choose your family, but you can’t choose your friends?”

 

Harris rolls his eyes. “It’s not that at all. It’s literally the _opposite_ of that. Honestly, how you and D—”

 

“Uh-uh,” Isaac says, stepping forward and cutting him off. “You don’t say that name. You don’t ever say that name, remember? Not after Kate.”

 

Harris’ lips tighten, but he shuts up. About that, at least. Other subjects—like Isaac’s impending bullet wound and possible death—are still up for discussion.

 

Or gloating.

 

Adrian’s never really been picky.

 

“On your knees,” he says, waving the gun in what Isaac assumes—for those in the world with a functioning sense of self-preservation—is a threatening manner.

 

“In this?” Isaac’s voice is scandalized. _He_ ’s scandalized. This is Grade-A New York muck he’s standing in. It could probably strip a car and put it up on blocks all by itself, no chop shop necessary. “First of all, that’s disgusting, second of all, isn’t that a little too cliché? Like, the dry cleaner’s was bad enough but _this_ —“

 

Harris snarls, and steps forward, the barrel of the gun settling somewhere around the area of Isaac’s chest, and Isaac shuts up faster than he thinks he ever has in his life.

 

Which, of course, because his life is a goddamn movie, is when Harris gets hit with a perfect flying tackle—some assistance provided by the couch, which promptly collapses the rest of the way immediately afterwards—by a blur in blue.

 

“Holy shit,” he says, staring down at the tangle of limbs and bad fashion statements at his feet. Harris caught _air_ on that hit, at least a foot and a half under his feet before he dropped again, landing underneath a mountain in an FBI windbreaker.

 

“Boyd played football in college,” says a voice from the mouth of the alley, and oh, _there’s_ Mahealani, cool as ever, not even a sheen of sweat to show that he, too, had to have run at least six blocks through midday traffic to get here. “He keeps with it.”

 

Boyd snorts from where he’s currently sitting, which happens to be the lower half of Adrian Harris. “I have to, Danny, otherwise you would just try and run them down, and we haven’t got the time for that.”

 

Harris, his face half buried in grime, gurgles.

 

“I surfed,” Mahealani confides, moving to stand next to Isaac, all of them looking at Harris consideringly. “And played lacrosse. Boyd doesn’t think it’s a real sport.”

 

“What, surfing or lacrosse?” Isaac says, taking a break from enjoying the sight of Harris gasping for breath to look around for McCall, of which there is still no sign of.

 

“Lacrosse,” Boyd says, finally leveraging himself off of Harris. He slaps a pair of cuffs around his wrists, and then stands back with Isaac and Mahealani, the three of them staring like they’re taking in a piece of sludge and old piece-of-something-that-may-have-once-been-paper covered modern art. “Sure, it’s old as hell, with tradition and all that, but when it comes down to it, it’s a bunch of dudes chasing a ball with too many rules.”

 

Mahealani raises an eyebrow. “And that doesn’t describe football, how?”

 

Boyd grins. “It’s not all what you see on television.”

 

“Oh my god,” Harris gasps from the ground. “Shut _up_.”

 

~

 

McCall, it turns out, had gotten held up by the fact that a van had pulled up right after Harris had bolted, a van that was full of—Surprise!—bags of counterfeit money, fresh from their previous lives as books.

 

“Wow,” Isaac says, looking around the processing table that’s just outside of the cage in the evidence lockup. He’s surrounded by enough fake cash to buy him a fake country if he wanted, especially if that fake country took American money and wasn’t too picky about the criminal history of its leader. “If this were real, we’d be rich.”

 

“We’d be more than rich,” McCall says, grunting a bit as he lifts up one of the small pallets he’s been saran-wrapping, grouping the counterfeits in tightly bound stacks of fictional millions. “We’d single-handedly be able to restart NASA’s moon program, and run it for about fifty years.”

 

Isaac squints at him. “Why do you know that? Wait, no, scratch that, why is the _moon program_ your first thought when presented with literal heaping mounds of cash, fake or not?”

 

“I like the moon,” McCall says, matter-of-factly.

 

“He likes the moon,” Isaac says, incredulously. “Unbelievable.”

 

McCall shrugs. “It _was_ my first choice, going into college. Ask Stiles—have you met Stiles?—he’ll tell you. Or Allison.”

 

“No, I haven’t met Stiles—which, is that a real name? Like an actual person willingly calls themselves and has others call them that?—and I _will_ ask Allison, and I would have asked her sooner, if you’d let me know you were almost an _astronaut_.” Isaac is offended. Partly because he didn’t know—thank you, Derek, for not digging up _that_ tidbit—and partly because it hadn’t come up sooner.

 

Not that he has any delusions of how close he and the McCalls are—that’s a lie, he has plenty of delusions, most of which increasingly (distressingly?) involve both Scott _and_ Allison, possibly in mutual states of undress, possibly with _him_ —but he’d like to think that after nearly a decade of being at least peripherally a part of each other’s lives that he knows _something_ about them.

 

Even if it’s just something as silly as McCall wanting to go to the moon.

 

~~~

 

_New York City, New York_   
_September, 2015_   
_Two weeks later_

 

“So, you’re Lahey.” Stiles knows he’s skating the edge of rude, but he can’t help it. This is the dude Scott’s been chasing for a little under a decade, the one who’s got his own special code name and a blurry surveillance photo of himself on Scott and Allison’s fridge.

 

He’s important, that’s more than obvious, and Stiles is worried about just _how_ important he is, and in what way. Mostly because that’s his job as Childhood Best Friend, but also because Scott has a habit of making deep and lasting connections over the course of five minutes of stilted conversation—ahem, _Allison_ —and there’s a huge difference—or, at least, Stiles hopes and prays there is—between meet cutes at UC Berkley and international games of catch me if you can.

 

“Uh, yeah,” Lahey says uncertainly, glancing over at Scott, as if he’s looking for some sort of instructions on how to deal with belligerent best friends who also happen to be New York City homicide detectives. Which, great, great, that’s awesome, because apparently Lahey feels like _Scott’s_ important, important enough to maybe want to make nice with his friends (even if said friends are being assholes), and it’s always nice when the people he’s suspicious of seem to reciprocate the feelings he’s suspicious of.

 

Or whatever.

 

Stiles takes a drink—because he can, thank you, Ethan, and thank you Martin Blonsky, attempted thief, for earning him free drinks tonight—then sticks out his hand. “Stiles Stilinski, NYPD Homicide, nice to meet you.”

 

Lahey takes it, and Stiles drags him in for the hug-slap-thump that seems to be par for the course for the bros these days. When Lahey’s close enough, his ear right by Stiles’ mouth, he pauses the motion of the bro embrace to whisper, “If you screw with him, or God help me, screw him, I swear on my mother’s grave, I will find you, and I will put you with Jimmy Hoffa.”

 

He steps back, smiles the smile that he calls The Soother, and Malia calls The Dahmer, and is weirdly pleased when Lahey just grins back.

 

Scott, of course, has known Stiles since they were six, and is squinting at him the way that says he knows damn well what Stiles is up to, and is mad that he can’t quite prove it.

 

“So,” Stiles says brightly, because if someone is going to get this trainwreck started properly, it’s going to be him, “Who’s up for nickel shots? Ethan owes me a night of free drinks—”

 

“I’m still half convinced you _paid_ Blonsky to try and rob the place,” Scott mutters.

 

“ _Hey_.” Stiles switches from bright to indignant like a pro, because he _is_ a pro, thank you very much. “Less chatter from the peanuts, yeah?”

 

Lahey raises a hand. “What about the rest of the legumes?”

 

Stiles turns his head slowly, eyes narrowing. “Shush, Lahey. The opinion of ex—no! current!—felons is _not_ appreciated at this juncture, even if they know what in the hell a ‘ _legume_ ’ is.

 

“The point is,” he continues, raising a hand imperiously, and dear God is he thankful that Danny isn’t here, because he would have never gotten this far if he were, “Is that we are going to get smashed, me for free, and you two for significantly less money than you would anywhere else, and you are going to tell me _everything_ the FBI has managed to rustle up for Grand Theft Art over there to work on.”

 

~

 

Three hours later, they are. Sloshed, that is.

 

Way past sloshed, if Scott’s current activity of sleeping in one of the booths that line the back wall is any indication. Stiles has already called Allison to come get him—she’s back in town, fresh off something or other involving a country he’s almost positive he’s never heard of—and he and Lahey are waiting for a cab.

 

The lights are up, and the only other people left in O’Hallighan’s are Ethan behind the bar, and two of the bouncers, who’re waiting on cabs of their own. Stiles is sipping water— _thank_ you, Ethan—and watching Lahey, who’s watching Scott.

 

He’s got this bemused expression on his face, like he isn’t sure what to _do_ with Scott, or even what to do with himself, and it’s scaring Stiles a bit, because that’s exactly the same way Scott looked at Allison when they first met, back when he forgot literally everything around him because she _was_ everything around him.

 

“You like him,” Stiles says, because he’s drunk, and it’s true.

 

Lahey’s head whips around so fast he thinks he hears the cartilage crack. “What makes you say that?”

 

He sounds so _defensive_ , like he’d been trying hard not to let on that he liked anyone, especially not Scott, and he’s mad that Stiles has figured it out and, god forbid, _said_ something about it.

 

He’d asked a question, though, and Stiles is in an answering mood. “Number one,” he says, ticking it off on his fingers, “you played a game of cat-and-mouse with him for what? Five years? Left him _notes_ —” and here he levels a flat look at Lahey, who’s already looking a bit flustered “—Seriously, dude, notes? _Anyway_ , then you break out of prison, and leave a note _there_ , too, after five years of sending fucking _hand-drawn greeting cards_ , which, let’s be honest? If it were anyone _but_ Scott and Allison getting those cards, you’d have gotten your mail privileges revoked _so fast_.”

 

Lahey shrugs. “So what? That doesn’t prove anything, except for maybe that I’m obsessive, and that McCall has a healthy disrespect for basic procedure when it suits him.”

 

Stiles rolls his eyes. “You’re reaching, my friend, you’re reaching so far you’re about to fall over.”

 

He almost says, “And besides, what about Allison?”, except that’s when Allison walks in, and Lahey transfers the same look he’s been giving Scott the whole night to her, and oh, _fuck_.

 

He doesn’t realize he’s said it out loud until both Allison and Lahey are looking at him with concerned expressions. Stiles waves them off with something about not remembering something he had to do, but _shit_ , how the hell does Scott manage to get himself into these sorts of things, like bad enough he had an international thief á la Sean Connery in _Entrapment_ sending him postcards or whatever, but now said thief is crushing hard on both him _and_ his _wife_.

 

If Stiles didn’t know any better—and he does, he does know better, but fuck if this isn’t his _life_ , apparently—he’d say that he was a co-star in some weird, semi-gay Lifetime movie co-produced by Logo and Penthouse, but nope, it’s just Scott, who’s smiling like the sun just came out at both Allison _and_ Lahey as all three of them wobble their way out of O’Hallighan’s towards Allison’s car.

 

When they’ve finally left, Stiles drops his head onto the table with an audible _thump_.

 

“Fuck me,” he says, with feeling.

 

“Go home,” Ethan says from the bar.

 

~~~

 

_New York City, New York_   
_September, 2015_   
_Four days later_

 

Isaac Lahey is in the lobby of A&M Security, flirting with their receptionist, and wearing her husband’s clothes.

 

Allison actually has to take a step back around the corner, regroup, drag her mind back from the place where it desperately wanted to go and _stay_ , and make it stay _here_ instead. The last three months or so, she knows, ever since Lahey showed up on their front step after agreeing to work _with_ Scott instead of slowly driving him out of his mind, haven’t been easy, exactly.

 

For Lahey and Scott because they aren’t used to being on the same side of things, and for Allison because she’s coming to realize that she’s made _space_ for Lahey, at her breakfast table, in her mind, in her _life_. He’s no longer just Scott’s white whale, he’s Scott’s quasi-partner, her sort-of friend, the guy who will gently shove her over on Wednesdays and make omelettes and complain that there’s never enough bacon.

 

She’s talked about it, with Lydia, who’d laughed, poured her another whisky, and told her to come back when she knew how Lahey was in the sack.

 

Allison had not spoken to Lydia for a week after that.

 

Erica Reyes, whose husband worked with Scott, had been a little more circumspect.

 

“He’s like, you know, an ex-boyfriend,” she’d said, panting a little.

 

They’d been running in Central Park, something Lydia had started, dragged all of her acquaintances who hadn’t currently been suffering from fatal diseases to, and then abandoned as soon as it became something close to habit. Erica and Allison—along with Kira, Jordan, Malia, and Aiden on weekends—were all that were left of the original herd.

 

“What?” Allison had said, thanking whoever was listening or even vaguely paying attention that she was already flushed from the exercise.

 

Erica had waved a hand. “You know, like you hear all about them, you feel like you know them, you know they were important in your significant other’s life, but that’s all, like, mental, until you meet them, and suddenly your brain’s like ‘ _oh, shit, how do I do this_ ’?”

 

“I’ve met Scott’s exes, though,” Allison had pointed out, “And I’ve never had this problem with _them_.” 

 

Erica had snorted. “He’s not really _Scott’s_ , though, is he?”

 

“Excuse me?” Allison had almost tripped, but managed to catch herself before she fell, or worse, gave something away. Whatever that something might be.

 

“I’ve seen your fridge, okay,” Erica had pointed out. Which, the fact that nearly everyone brought that up probably meant something, but Allison couldn’t, for the life of her, figure out _what_. “And,” she’d continued, “although I know you’re not talking to her right now—what are you guys, twelve?—I’ve talked to Lydia. It’s both of you guys, both of you and Lahey.”

 

Which, when all was said and done, was _supremely_ unhelpful, but unless Allison wanted to listen to Erica—or Christ, Lydia—elaborate, that was all she was going to get.

 

It didn’t help, it really didn’t, that Lahey was living with Melissa—he still hadn’t given any sign that he knew she was Scott’s mother, even though none of them were trying to hide it—and now, apparently, wearing the clothes Scott had left there for when he stayed over, instead of the vast collection of shabby, but painfully chic clothing he seemed to have picked up from every thrift store and second hand shop he could reach without setting off the alarm and sending the Marshals after him.

 

Lahey also looks really, really good in Scott’s old jeans, and Scott’s half of the faded grey UC Berkley t-shirts they’d gotten from rushing ΛΕΩ in their sophomore year.

 

“Fuck,” Allison breathes, and then, borrowing from Scott, “Mother _fucker_.”

 

Which is pathetic, because this is her place of _work_ , and Kate would absolutely be howling with laughter—god _damn_ it, Allison, lock that damn box _up_.

 

She takes a deep breath, puts on a face that she hope says ‘I am not having an existential crisis, and if, by some chance, I _were_ , it definitely doesn’t involve _you_ ’, and walks back around the corner.

 

Lahey turns at the sound of her heels, a grin breaking across his face as he catches sight of her.

 

“Allison,” he says, waving. Heather, the receptionist, looks a bit like she does when Stiles comes in to ask Lydia for something on the downest of lows: appreciative, just a little bit wistful, and willing to let them flirt, but no more.

 

Heather, it must be said, is a damn good receptionist, and one of their best field testers.

 

“Hey, Lahey,” she says, giving him a once over, even though she’s already _had_ her freak out, because she’s human, god damn it, and she’ll look where she likes. “What are you doing here?”

 

Lahey rocks back on his heels, thumbs hooked onto the edge of his pockets. “I can’t come in, wish my boss’ wife a good day, catch up?”

 

“No, you saw me at breakfast—” and _boom_ , there goes Heather’s eyebrow, it’s like Lydia has ‘freakish control over facial muscles’ on their job applications “—and we’ve got nothing to catch up on, all your work’s with Scott.”

 

“See, that’s where you’re wrong,” Lahey says, starting to walk backwards towards the doors. Allison follows because, well, that’d been where she was going anyway. “We’ve got tons to catch up on, boatloads, oodles—” they hit the door, and are now out on the pavement “—and McCall and I need your help on a job.”

 

_Ah_. Allison grins. _There it is_.

 

~

 

It’s the Dutchman, Allison learns, after she gets to the Federal Building, and she and Scott have a very intense conversation involving absolutely zero words about the fact that _yes, Lahey’s wearing your clothes, Scott_ and _what am I supposed to do about this guy, Allison_.

 

She knows—or is supposed to know—absolutely nothing about the Dutchman, except for the fact that Lahey named him, Scott’s been keeping an eye out for him, and that he likes Van Gogh. The last one is an assumption, based off of what he’d nicked from the Musée d’Orsay back in 2009, but it seems a good a guess as any.

 

“But why do you need me?” she asks, about twenty minutes into the briefing, and that’s when Lahey turns to her with what can only be described a look of glee, and her internal alarm bells start going off like they should have all the way back in A&M’s lobby.

 

_Con man, Argent_ , she reminds herself. _Don’t ever let yourself forget that_.

 

“There’s a Dutch Masters exhibit they’re putting on at the Met,” Scott says, reluctantly.

 

Allison blinks. “So? There’s whole galleries of Dutch Masters, I’ve walked through them a thousand times with Ka—I’ve walked through them a thousand times.”

 

Lahey gives her a funny look. She ignores it.

 

“Yeah, but this one’s special,” Mahealani says, twirling a pen between his fingers. “They’re having a reception, some bloke is going to give a speech, and—”

 

“And,” Lahey says, cutting him off, “They’ve got about twenty pieces on loan from the British Museum and the Van Gogh Gallery in the Netherlands.”

 

Allison taps her fingers against the table. “So the Met’s got more art, and a special outing, you all are trying to catch the Dutchman, I still don’t see why you—Oh.” She looks at Scott, eyes wide. “Oh, Scott, no. _No_.”

 

Scott grimaces, but he says it anyway. “A&M Security did the last round of improvements for the Met, you’ve got the most up to date details on how they operate.”

 

“And the reason you can’t just, I don’t know, _ask_ them?” She really, really should have stayed at work.

 

Boyd sighs. “We think the Dutchman is working on the museum staff, or at least has an in with them. So if we go to the museum…”

 

“They know you’re coming, and rabbit,” Allison finishes. “And how do you know he’s even coming?”

 

Mahealani, Boyd, and Lahey all look at Scott, who rolls his eyes.

 

“Partially, I have a hunch,” he says. “And partially, I’ve got an alias of his coming into LaGuardia, security cam footage that matches the two details we know about the guy, this fits what we know of his profile, and it fits what Lahey knows of his profile.”

 

“Some seriously shaky shit,” Allison says, because it is, and her family didn’t get to where they are now by going off of intel that sounds better suited to a cable network show.

 

“Sound enough for a judge to sign off on it,” Scott says, and damn if he isn’t smug about it, too.

 

“So you’ve got a warrant, or whatever this is called,” Allison says, ticking them off on her fingers, “An international thief to stop, a museum you can’t _tell_ about said international thief, and a hunch. Where does that leave you?”

 

Lahey, she can see, is almost bouncing in his seat.

 

“We’ve got to get solid evidence against him,” Mahealani says. “That means catching him in the act, which will be almost impossible, or getting him on possession of stolen art.”

 

“You’d have to know where he was, and where he put the art,” Allison points out.

 

“I _know_ ,” Lahey says, and there’s that faint trace of… _something_ in his voice. “Which means we’ve got to put some sort of tracker on the art, and since McCall refuses to let the Dutchman take any _actual_ art—”

 

“If we lost it, Yukimura would kill us,” Scott says, in the weary tones of someone who has had to say the same thing far too many times. “And after she was done, she’d hand us back to Deaton, and we’d _wish_ she’d killed us deader.”

 

Lahey shudders at the mention of Deaton. “Right, well, personal funeral plans aside, since we’re not allowed to let the bad guy get away with the _real_ art, we have to replace it with _fake_ art.”

 

“And the museum can’t know,” Allison says. “Please tell me you’re not—”

 

“Pre-heist heist,” Lahey says gleefully. “We go in, we replace anything the Dutchman might be interested in with a copy that’s got a tracker in it, and we wait for one of them to start moving.”

 

“Unfuckingreal,” Allison mutters, then, louder, “And where are we gonna get all these fakes?”

 

Lahey, still grinning like a maniac, raises his hand.

 

“ _Motherfucker_ ,” she and Scott say, in unison.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At long last, I return from the deep.
> 
> This chapter brought to you by tons of caffeine, an unhealthy amount of country music, and a Deep and Abiding sense of Guilt. I should mention that, aside from browsing a ton of online galleries, I know nothing about the museums of New York City (oh, how I long to rectify that), so we're gonna get real funky with architecture in another couple chapters or so.
> 
> Notes for this chapter:
> 
> Fans of basic network TV will recognize the counterfeiting scheme from Hawaii Five-0, though this version of it wrapped up a lot quicker than the other.
> 
> O'Hallighan's returns, and continues to be the most irresponsible drinking establishment I've ever created.
> 
> The Met has almost two hundred works of Dutch art, Masters or no, and their whole gallery is available to view on their website.
> 
> For clarification, though this will probably come up later: Stiles Stilinski is NYPD Homicide, and Malia Tate is his partner. Kira Yukimura and Jordan Parrish are FDNY, operating out of the same firehouse and on the same shift. Erica Reyes teaches Spanish Lit and Women's Studies at NYU. Lydia Martin's girlfriend is exactly who you think she is.
> 
> Next time: Napoleon Solo! (Probably)


End file.
